+Chris Hemedinger is the Director of SAS User Engagement, which includes our SAS Communities and SAS User Groups. Since 1993, Chris has worked for SAS as an author, a software developer, an R&D manager and a consultant. Inexplicably, Chris is still coasting on the limited fame he earned as an author of SAS For Dummies.
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
I've said it before: spreadsheets are not databases. However, many of us use spreadsheets as if they were databases, and then we struggle when the spreadsheet layout does not support database-style rigor of predictable rows, columns, and variable types -- the basic elements we need for analytics and reporting. If
WARNING: This blog post references Avengers: Infinity War and contains story spoilers. But it also contains useful information about random number generators (RNGs) -- tempting! If you haven't yet seen the movie, you should make peace with this inner conflict before reading on. Throughout the movie, Thanos makes it clear
The title of this blog says what you really need to know: SAS Enterprise Guide does have a future, and it's a bright one. Ever since SAS Studio debuted in 2014, onlookers have speculated about its impact on the development of SAS Enterprise Guide. I think that we have been
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is famous for inventing the World Wide Web and for the construction of URLs -- a piece of syntax that every 8-year-old is now familiar with. According to the lore, when Sir Tim invented URLs he did not imagine that Internet surfers of all ages and backgrounds
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
I've used SAS with a bunch of different REST APIs: GitHub, Brightcove, Google Analytics, Lithium, LinkedIn, and more. For most of these I have to send user/password or "secret" application tokens to the web service so that it knows who I am and what data I can retrieve. I do
If you work in a team environment, you might be accustomed to using mapped network drives for source data folders or to publish results. If you've recently moved to a SAS server environment, you might not have those mapped drives available. How can you tell? This question was posted on
The internet is rich with data, and much of that data seems to exist only on web pages, which -- for some crazy reason -- are designed for humans to read. When students/researchers want to apply data science techniques to analyze collect and analyze that data, they often turn to
Social media has brought anniversary dates to the forefront. Every day, my view of Google Photos or Facebook shows me a collection of photos from exactly some number of years ago to remind me of how good things were back then. These apps are performing the simplest of date-based math
