R help - Jul 2009 - Entire Organization Switching from SAS to R - Any experience?

My institute has been heavily dependent on SAS for the past while, and
SAS is starting to charge us a very deep amount for license renewal.
Since we are a non-profit organization that is definitely not
sustainable.  The team is brainstorming possibility of switching to R,
at least gradually.  I am talking about the entire institute with
considerable number of analysts using SAS their entire career.
There?s a handful of us using R regularly.  What kind of problems and
challenges have you faced?  Any insight is much appreciated.  Thank
you very much!

Kelvin

*hum*

How much of the "employes" of your institute use statistical
softwares? 1-5?
5-20? 20-50?
I think a brief description could help on the discussion.

cheers

milton


On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Kel Lam <lamkelf@gmail.com> wrote:
> My institute has been heavily dependent on SAS for the past while, and
> SAS is starting to charge us a very deep amount for license renewal.
> Since we are a non-profit organization that is definitely not
> sustainable.  The team is brainstorming possibility of switching to R,
> at least gradually.  I am talking about the entire institute with
> considerable number of analysts using SAS their entire career.
> There’s a handful of us using R regularly.  What kind of problems and
> challenges have you faced?  Any insight is much appreciated.  Thank
> you very much!
>
> Kelvin
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html<http://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html>
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
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Kel Lam wrote:
> My institute has been heavily dependent on SAS for the past while, and
> SAS is starting to charge us a very deep amount for license renewal.
> Since we are a non-profit organization that is definitely not
> sustainable.  The team is brainstorming possibility of switching to R,
> at least gradually.  I am talking about the entire institute with
> considerable number of analysts using SAS their entire career.
> There?s a handful of us using R regularly.  What kind of problems and
> challenges have you faced?  Any insight is much appreciated.  Thank
> you very much!
> 
> Kelvin
One of your challenges will be that with the increased productivity of 
the team you will have time for more intellectually challenging 
problems.  That frustrates some people.

Frank

-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University

Kel Lam <lamkelf at gmail.com> wrote:
> My institute has been heavily dependent on SAS for the past while, and
> SAS is starting to charge us a very deep amount for license renewal.
> Since we are a non-profit organization that is definitely not
> sustainable.  The team is brainstorming possibility of switching to R,
> at least gradually.  I am talking about the entire institute with
> considerable number of analysts using SAS their entire career.
> There?s a handful of us using R regularly.  What kind of problems and
> challenges have you faced?  Any insight is much appreciated.  Thank
> you very much!
> 
> Kelvin
Background: I used SAS intensively for about 15 yr, I used
Systat for about 5 yr, and now I use R almost exclusively. The
group I work with has changed from mostly SAS to mostly R over
the years.

My advice is, think about training. Because SAS and R have such
different models of how statistical programming is structured,
it's not trivial to switch from one to the other.

A lot will depend on what sort of work you are doing. The main
problem we've experienced is that R does not easily handle very
large datasets on standard PC hardware. We still do some
processing with SAS in those cases, though we've been able to
reduce the number of SAS licenses we need. 


-- 
Mike Prager, NOAA, Beaufort, NC
* Opinions expressed are personal and not represented otherwise.
* Any use of tradenames does not constitute a NOAA endorsement.

We use SAS and R here (a biostat department and consulting unit), in
part because there are some things SAS does that R doesn't.  In
particular, we use SAS proc nlmixed with custom likelihood functions.  R
has similar capability but does not allow custom likelihood; the authors
say adding it would be non-trivial.

I don't know how common such absolute barriers are, but they would be
one thing to watch for.  As others have noted, datasets too big too fit
in memory are difficult in R (though the 3G barrier only applies to 32
bit hardware).

If you have "customers" who themselves do data analysis, they may also
resist change.

I would think switching from SAS to R is a pretty big deal; it would
probably be easier if you did not need to switch existing projects.  Of
course, that still leaves you paying some license fees.  But the switch
will have substantial short-term costs in time, if not money, even if
users are motivated.

Ross Boylan

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 17:40 -0400, Kel Lam wrote:
> My institute has been heavily dependent on SAS for the past while, and
> SAS is starting to charge us a very deep amount for license renewal.
> Since we are a non-profit organization that is definitely not
> sustainable.  The team is brainstorming possibility of switching to R,
> at least gradually.  I am talking about the entire institute with
> considerable number of analysts using SAS their entire career.
> There?s a handful of us using R regularly.  What kind of problems and
> challenges have you faced?  Any insight is much appreciated.  Thank
> you very much!
> 
> Kelvin
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

Jeffrey J. Hallman wrote:
> Hmmm, I sense a story in the offing. Was that an accidental emergency, or
one you created?
> 
> Frank E Harrell Jr <f.harrell at vanderbilt.edu> writes:
>> I differ with Marc in one way.  It is amazing what people can learn
when you
>> create an emergency for them to do so.
>>
>> Frank
>> -- 
>> Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
>>                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt
University
>>
> 
Lots of little emergencies with good results.
Frank

-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University