A bit early but the latest editions of both SAS and R were released last week.
SAS 9.3 is clearly a major release with multiple enhancements to make SAS both relevant and pertinent in enterprise software in the age of big data. Also many more R specific, JMP specific and partners like Teradata specific enhancements.
http://support.sas.com/software/93/index.html
Features
Data management
- Enhanced manageability for improved performance
- In-database processing (EL-T pushdown)
- Enhanced performance for loading oracle data
- New ET-L transforms
- Data access
Data quality
- SAS® Data Integration Server includes DataFlux® Data Management Platform for enhanced data quality
- Master Data Management (DataFlux® qMDM)
- Provides support for master hub of trusted entity data.
Analytics
- SAS® Enterprise Miner™
- New survival analysis predicts when an event will happen, not just if it will happen.
- New rate making capability for insurance predicts optimal insurance premium for individuals based on attributes known at application time.
- Time Series Data Mining node (experimental) applies data mining techniques to transactional, time-stamped data.
- Support Vector Machines node (experimental) provides a supervised machine learning method for prediction and classification.
- SAS® Forecast Server
- SAS Forecast Server is integrated with the SAP APO Demand Planning module to provide SAP users with access to a superior forecasting engine and automatic forecasting capabilities.
- SAS® Model Manager
- Seamless integration of R models with the ability to register and manage R models in SAS Model Manager.
- Ability to perform champion/challenger side-by-side comparisons between SAS and R models to see which model performs best for a specific need.
- SAS/OR® and SAS® Simulation Studio
- Optimization
- Simulation
- Automatic input distribution fitting using JMP with SAS Simulation Studio.
Text analytics
- SAS® Text Miner
- SAS® Enterprise Content Categorization
- SAS® Sentiment Analysis
Scalability and high-performance
- SAS® Analytics Accelerator for Teradata (new product)
- SAS® Grid Manager
and latest from http://www.r-project.org/ I was a bit curious to know why the different licensing for R now (from GPL2 to GPL2- GPL 3)
LICENCE:
• No parts of R are now licensed solely under GPL-2. The licences for packages rpart and survival have been changed, which means that the licence terms for R as distributed are GPL-2 | GPL-3.
This is a maintenance release to consolidate various minor fixes to 2.13.0.
CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.13.1:
NEW FEATURES:
• iconv() no longer translates NA strings as "NA".
• persp(box = TRUE) now warns if the surface extends outside the
box (since occlusion for the box and axes is computed assuming
the box is a bounding box). (PR#202.)
• RShowDoc() can now display the licences shipped with R, e.g.
RShowDoc("GPL-3").
• New wrapper function showNonASCIIfile() in package tools.
• nobs() now has a "mle" method in package stats4.
• trace() now deals correctly with S4 reference classes and
corresponding reference methods (e.g., $trace()) have been added.
• xz has been updated to 5.0.3 (very minor bugfix release).
• tools::compactPDF() gets more compression (usually a little,
sometimes a lot) by using the compressed object streams of PDF
1.5.
• cairo_ps(onefile = TRUE) generates encapsulated EPS on platforms
with cairo >= 1.6.
• Binary reads (e.g. by readChar() and readBin()) are now supported
on clipboard connections. (Wish of PR#14593.)
• as.POSIXlt.factor() now passes ... to the character method
(suggestion of Joshua Ulrich). [Intended for R 2.13.0 but
accidentally removed before release.]
• vector() and its wrappers such as integer() and double() now warn
if called with a length argument of more than one element. This
helps track down user errors such as calling double(x) instead of
as.double(x).
INSTALLATION:
• Building the vignette PDFs in packages grid and utils is now part
of running make from an SVN checkout on a Unix-alike: a separate
make vignettes step is no longer required.
These vignettes are now made with keep.source = TRUE and hence
will be laid out differently.
• make install-strip failed under some configuration options.
• Packages can customize non-standard installation of compiled code
via a src/install.libs.R script. This allows packages that have
architecture-specific binaries (beyond the package's shared
objects/DLLs) to be installed in a multi-architecture setting.
SWEAVE & VIGNETTES:
• Sweave() and Stangle() gain an encoding argument to specify the
encoding of the vignette sources if the latter do not contain a
\usepackage[]{inputenc} statement specifying a single input
encoding.
• There is a new Sweave option figs.only = TRUE to run each figure
chunk only for each selected graphics device, and not first using
the default graphics device. This will become the default in R
2.14.0.
• Sweave custom graphics devices can have a custom function
foo.off() to shut them down.
• Warnings are issued when non-portable filenames are found for
graphics files (and chunks if split = TRUE). Portable names are
regarded as alphanumeric plus hyphen, underscore, plus and hash
(periods cause problems with recognizing file extensions).
• The Rtangle() driver has a new option show.line.nos which is by
default false; if true it annotates code chunks with a comment
giving the line number of the first line in the sources (the
behaviour of R >= 2.12.0).
• Package installation tangles the vignette sources: this step now
converts the vignette sources from the vignette/package encoding
to the current encoding, and records the encoding (if not ASCII)
in a comment line at the top of the installed .R file.
DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:
• The internal functions .readRDS() and .saveRDS() are now
deprecated in favour of the public functions readRDS() and
saveRDS() introduced in R 2.13.0.
• Switching off lazy-loading of code _via_ the LazyLoad field of
the DESCRIPTION file is now deprecated. In future all packages
will be lazy-loaded.
• The off-line help() types "postscript" and "ps" are deprecated.
UTILITIES:
• R CMD check on a multi-architecture installation now skips the
user's .Renviron file for the architecture-specific tests (which
do read the architecture-specific Renviron.site files). This is
consistent with single-architecture checks, which use
--no-environ.
• R CMD build now looks for DESCRIPTION fields BuildResaveData and
BuildKeepEmpty for per-package overrides. See ‘Writing R
Extensions’.
BUG FIXES:
• plot.lm(which = 5) was intended to order factor levels in
increasing order of mean standardized residual. It ordered the
factor labels correctly, but could plot the wrong group of
residuals against the label. (PR#14545)
• mosaicplot() could clip the factor labels, and could overlap them
with the cells if a non-default value of cex.axis was used.
(Related to PR#14550.)
• dataframe[[row,col]] now dispatches on [[ methods for the
selected column (spotted by Bill Dunlap).
• sort.int() would strip the class of an object, but leave its
object bit set. (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)
• pbirthday() and qbirthday() did not implement the algorithm
exactly as given in their reference and so were unnecessarily
inaccurate.
pbirthday() now solves the approximate formula analytically
rather than using uniroot() on a discontinuous function.
The description of the problem was inaccurate: the probability is
a tail probablity (‘2 _or more_ people share a birthday’)
• Complex arithmetic sometimes warned incorrectly about producing
NAs when there were NaNs in the input.
• seek(origin = "current") incorrectly reported it was not
implemented for a gzfile() connection.
• c(), unlist(), cbind() and rbind() could silently overflow the
maximum vector length and cause a segfault. (PR#14571)
• The fonts argument to X11(type = "Xlib") was being ignored.
• Reading (e.g. with readBin()) from a raw connection was not
advancing the pointer, so successive reads would read the same
value. (Spotted by Bill Dunlap.)
• Parsed text containing embedded newlines was printed incorrectly
by as.character.srcref(). (Reported by Hadley Wickham.)
• decompose() used with a series of a non-integer number of periods
returned a seasonal component shorter than the original series.
(Reported by Rob Hyndman.)
• fields = list() failed for setRefClass(). (Reported by Michael
Lawrence.)
• Reference classes could not redefine an inherited field which had
class "ANY". (Reported by Janko Thyson.)
• Methods that override previously loaded versions will now be
installed and called. (Reported by Iago Mosqueira.)
• addmargins() called numeric(apos) rather than
numeric(length(apos)).
• The HTML help search sometimes produced bad links. (PR#14608)
• Command completion will no longer be broken if tail.default() is
redefined by the user. (Problem reported by Henrik Bengtsson.)
• LaTeX rendering of markup in titles of help pages has been
improved; in particular, \eqn{} may be used there.
• isClass() used its own namespace as the default of the where
argument inadvertently.
• Rd conversion to latex mis-handled multi-line titles (including
cases where there was a blank line in the \title section).
Also see this interesting blog
Examples of tasks replicated in SAS and R
DECISION STATS 