I have been on a whirlwind tour locally here in Australia visiting existing SAS customers where the focus of discussions have centered around SAS and Hadoop. I am happy to report that during these discussions, customers have been consistently surprised and excited about what we are doing around SAS on Hadoop! Three things in particular stood out and have resonated well with our wonderful SAS users community that I thought I share them here for the benefit of the broader community.
1. All SAS products are Hadoop enabled today
Whilst some of our newer products such as Visual Analytics and In-Memory Statistics for Hadoop were built from day one with Hadoop in mind, you might not be aware that in fact all of our current SAS products have been Hadoop enabled and can take advantage of Hadoop today.
Our mature and robust SAS/Access interface to Hadoop technology allows SAS users today to easily connect to Hadoop data sources using any SAS applications. A key point here is being able to do this without having to understand any of the underlying technology or write a single line of MapReduce code. Furthermore, the SAS/Access interface for Hadoop has been optimised and can push SAS procedures into Hadoop for execution, thereby allowing developers to tap into the power of Hadoop and improving the performance of basic SAS operations.
2. SAS does Analytics in Hadoop
The SAS R&D team have worked extremely hard with our Hadoop distribution partners to take full advantage of the powerful technologies within the Hadoop ecosystem. We are driving integration deep into the heart of the Hadoop ecosystem with technologies such as HDFS, Hive, MapReduce, Pig and YARN.
The SAS users I have been speaking to have been pleasantly surprised by the depth of our integration with Hadoop and excited about what it means for them as end users. Whether it’s running analytics in our high performance in-memory servers within a Hadoop cluster or pushing analytics workload deep into the Hadoop environment, SAS is giving users the power and flexibility in deciding where and how they want to run their SAS workloads.
This point was powerfully made by none other than one of the co-founder of Hortonworks in his recent blog post and I couldn’t have phrased his comment better myself!
“Integrating SAS HPA and LASR with Apache Hadoop YARN provides tremendous benefits to customers using SAS products and Hadoop. It is a great example of the tremendous openness and vision shown by SAS”
3. Organisations are benefiting from SAS on Hadoop today
With Hadoop being THE new kid on the block, you might be wondering if there are any customers that are already taking advantage of SAS and Hadoop now. One such customer is Rogers Media – They’ve been doing some pretty cool stuff with SAS and Hadoop to drive real business value and outcomes!
In a chat with Dr. Goodnight during SAS Global Forum this year, Chris Dingle from Rogers Media shared how they are using SAS and Hadoop to better understand their audience. I was fortunate enough to be there in person myself, and I must say the keynote session on Hadoop and Rogers Media was a highlight for many people there and definitely got the masses thinking what they should be doing around SAS and Hadoop. For those of you who are interested in more details, here is a recap of the presentation explaining the SAS/Hortonworks integration as well as more details on the Rogers Media case study.
We are working with a number of organisations around the world on exciting SAS on Hadoop projects so watch this space!
All in all, it’s a great time to be a SAS user and it has never been easier to take advantage of the power of Hadoop as a SAS user. I encourage you find out more, reach out to us or leave comments here as we would love to hear about how you plan to leverage the power of SAS and Hadoop!
