Altair SLC 2026 series: Summary post #5

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For the background to this series of summary posts see Altair SLC 2026 series: Introduction to posts.

Book links:

Book A: Advanced Altair SLC

Comparing Altair SLC with SAS Software

A-05  From CDISC ADaM data to a validated comparison

A clinical chapter written by people who have done the work.

It follows the data journey end to end: acquisition and cleaning, transformation and integration, statistical analysis, visualisation, report generation. It covers the CDISC tooling that works with Altair SLC, from the Clinical Standards Toolkit to the R Pharmaverse.

Then it gets practical. Download the sample ADaM data, configure Altair SLC to read it, and build a macro that standardises and compares ADaM data sets.

The chapter closes with an exercise and a worked answer, because reading about clinical programming is not the same as doing it.

Advanced Altair SLC, chapter 8.

#ClinicalResearch #CDISC #ADaM #AltairSLC #StatisticalProgramming

Book B: Altair SLC for Business Users

Working with Altair SLC day to day

B-05  Everything you actually have to read and write

The data never arrives in the format you wanted.

One chapter in Book B covers what a working programmer really reads and writes: delimited files with PROC IMPORT, PROC EXPORT and ODS CSV; Excel through the XLSX and EXCEL LIBNAME engines and through ODS EXCEL; Microsoft Access; dBase; MySQL and MariaDB; ODBC through both the ODBC and ODBCOLD engines; and OLEdb.

The database connections added in Altair SLC 2026 are listed separately from those already there in 2025, so you can tell at a glance whether an upgrade solves your problem.

Altair SLC for Business Users, chapter 7.

#AltairSLC #Excel #ODBC #SQL #DataEngineering

Book C: Altair SLC for Companies

The case, the cost and the migration

C-05  Find out before you commit, not after

Will your SAS programs run in Altair SLC? You can find out before you spend anything.

Analytics Workbench syntax checks whole folders of programs through Analyse then Program Compatibility, and reports missing procedures, system options, global statements and Data Step options to an Excel file. The free Personal Edition is enough to run that check.

Book C also lists the known false positives, so that DIMn() and LAGn() are not mistaken for blockers when they work perfectly well.

Altair SLC for Companies, section 10.2.1.

#AltairSLC #Migration #SAS #ITStrategy

Please update ALL of my apps from Google Play!

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I hadn’t noticed, but I had to update the Google Licensing part of my apps to comply with new rules for Android 5 (Lollipop), which is why ALL of my apps installed from Google Play are no longer working on Android 5+!

Please don’t panic, as I’ve uploaded new versions of the following apps to Google Play that should work now:

  • Data Steps: Do This in SAS?
  • SQL: Do This in SAS?
  • Graphs: Do This in SAS?
  • Platforms: Do This in SAS?
  • EG: Do This in SAS?
  • Macros: Do This in SAS?
  • Efficiency: Do This in SAS?
  • Studio: Do This in SAS?

I’m glad I installed CyanogenMod 12 on my old HP TouchPad recently, so I can now be certain the Android 5 users can use my apps!

The apps “Data Steps: How Do You Do This in SAS?” and “SQL: How Do You Do This in SAS?” have recently been updated.

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I think I’ve now worked out the difference between blogs and forums!  I’m a little bit of a newbie to blogs, so please excuse my naivety. I’d been treating my blog posts as if they were forum discussions, with every comment being highlighted by the WordPress platform, but they are not really like that at all. Therefore, from now on, rather than posting comments to tell you about any app and product updates, you’ll be receiving a new blog post, and this is just such a post!

My apps are all related to each other, with the same basic underlying software, but just with different data in each one. In fact even that is not quite true, as some question topics in my apps are relevant to more than one app, so any topic updates generate new app versions for one or more apps. I use an Enterprise Guide project to organise my questions and answers, and then generate the appropriate data structures, but with the same data, for the Google Play, Amazon Appstore and Chrome Web Store versions of each app, so when each topic changes all of the affected apps are updated together.

This time I’ve updated my apps for Data Steps and SQL, and the new versions are now live in the 3 app stores. I’m also experimenting with Windows 10 Universal Apps too, but don’t hold your breath, as I’m not quite ready to release any apps in the Windows 10 Store just yet.

The latest versions of all the apps can be found here.

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