By using data provided by a Game of Thrones fan, we use SAS to look at screen time for scene locations and characters in this crazy popular show.
This blog post could be subtitled "To Catch a Thief" or maybe "Go ahead. Steal this blog. I dare you."* That's because I've used this technique several times to catch and report other web sites who lift the blog content from blogs.sas.com and present it as their own. Syndicating blog
JSON is a popular format for data exchange between APIs and some modern databases. It's also used as a way to archive audit logs in many systems. Because JSON can represent hierarchical relationships of data fields, many people consider it to be superior to the CSV format -- although it's
At SAS, we love data. Data is central to our corporate vision: to transform a world of data into a world of intelligence. We're also famous for enjoying M&Ms, but to us they are more than a sweet snack. They're also another source of data. My colleague Pete Privitera, with
Using SAS with REST APIs is fun and rewarding, but it's also complicated. When you're dealing with web services, credentials, data parsing and security, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. It's useful to have a simple program that verifies that the "basic plumbing" is working before
Every day before I even wake up, I have little "SAS robots" that do work for me. These are SAS batch jobs that gather data from external services and build data marts, generate reports, and send e-mail. One of those SAS jobs gathers Google Analytics data about our SAS blogs
At SAS, we've published more repositories on GitHub as a way to share our open source projects and examples. These "repos" (that's Git lingo) are created and maintained by experts in R&D, professional services (consulting), and SAS training. Some recent examples include: sas_kernel, which provides Jupyter notebook support for SAS.
JSON is the new XML. The number of SAS users who need to access JSON data has skyrocketed, thanks mainly to the proliferation of REST-based APIs and web services. Because JSON is structured data in text format, we've been able to offer simple parsing techniques that use DATA step and
Update 02Dec2016: Beginning with SAS 9.4 Maintenance 4, there is now a JSON libname engine. Read this new article to learn more -- you might prefer it to using DS2 for this task! Thanks to the proliferation of cloud services and REST-based APIs, SAS users have been making use of
Update 24Nov2015: The methods in this post no longer work for Twitter, as Twitter has discontinued support for its "share count" API that was used within the Twitter share buttons. But the Facebook method still works, and I've described a method for counting LinkedIn shares on another post. As of
