Gerhard Svolba

Gerhard Svolba was born in Vienna (1970). He studied Business Informatics and Statistics at University of Vienna and Technical University of Vienna, and holds a Master's Degree in these studies. From 1995 till 1999, he worked at the department for Medical Statistics, University of Vienna, as assistant professor, where he completed his PhD on Statistical Quality Control in Clinical Trials (the respective book is published in WUV-publishers). In 1999 Gerhard joined SAS and is responsible for the analytical projects in SAS Austria as well as the analytical products and solutions SAS offers.

In 2003 on his way to a customer site to consult them for data mining and data preparation, he had the idea to summarize his experience in written form. In 2004 the work on the SAS-Press book "Data Preparation for Analytics" started, which was finished in 2006. Since publishing of this book Gerhard speaks at numerous conferences around the world on Data Preparation and teaches his class "Building Analytics Data Marts" at many locations.

Gerhard likes to be in touch with customer and exchange ideas about analytics and data preparation. Since 2009 he is working on his new SAS Press book "Data Quality for Analytics", which is expected to be published end of 2011.

"Writing a book is like a long journey" Gerhard says, "when you start you do not have a 100 % idea of where and how you will end on what you will experience on your way. On your trip you will meet many interesting people, lots of content for your book project and many new insights for your work. When people from all over the world contact me and give me feedback on my book, this is the best remuneration for me".

Gerhard is family father of 3 teenage sons and loves to spend time with them. He likes to be out in the nature, in woods, mountains and especially on the water, as he is an enthusiastic sailor.

Gerhard's current website can be found under "http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Gerhard_Svolba", he will answer Emails under sastools.by.gerhard@gmx.net. Blog entries can be found unter http://www.sascommunity.org/wiki/Gerhard%27s_Blog.