A SAS programmer is working on a dataset that contains a variable 'purchase_date'. The programmer wants to manipulate this variable in a DATA step to calculate the number of days since the purchase. Which of the following SAS data types should 'purchase_date' ideally be to perform this calculation directly without needing to convert data types?
An analytics firm is looking to harness the power of in-memory analytics for complex computations and wants to decide between SAS Compute Server and SAS Cloud Analytics Services (CAS). Which scenario best justifies the choice of utilizing CAS over SAS Compute Server?
You are designing an algorithm that will perform a series of matrix multiplication operations for a large-scale machine learning application. Which processing technique would likely yield a better performance given the computational requirements of matrix multiplication in this context, and why?
You have been tasked with ensuring that a particular numeric format is available for use in a CAS session. This format is required to display currency values in the format `$#,##0.00;($#,##0.00)`. Assuming the format has already been created and stored appropriately in CAS, where should you verify its existence before applying it to your analysis?
When a user submits a PROC MEANS in a SAS Viya environment, the procedure is automatically directed to run in a specific execution context based on the data's location. Assuming the PROC MEANS is using a dataset that resides within the CAS server, where will the code execute?