The road to SAS Global Forum: A training Q&A series

The journey continues as we hear from instructors for each of the courses being offered on Thursday and Friday, April 21 and 22 after SAS Global Forum.

Our next stop is with instructor David Ghan who is teaching the Using SAS® Programs to Execute Pig and HiveQL in Hadoop and Efficient Programming Methods Using the SAS/ACCESS® LIBNAME Connection to Hadoop courses.

1. Why should people get excited about these courses?

These two courses are exciting because, as a SAS programmer, you can learn how to use SAS programming skills to process and analyze big data in the Hadoop platform and still leverage the infrastructure Hadoop provides to process large volumes of data quickly.

In the Using SAS® Programs to Execute Pig and HiveQL in Hadoop course you are introduced to open source Hive and Pig techniques for working with data in Hadoop and how to leverage that knowledge by integrating those techniques within SAS programs.

You’ll learn to work within the framework of the SAS language and still access the native capabilities of the Hive system for processing the data within the Hadoop cluster in the Friday offering of Efficient Programming Methods Using the SAS/ACCESS® LIBNAME Connection to Hadoop.

2. Who would get the most out of attending this course?

SAS programmers who need to be able to work with data stored in Hadoop.

3. You’re teaching two courses, one Thursday, and one, Friday. Who should attend both and why?

Both courses cover different methods of working with data in Hadoop from SAS. By taking both courses you'll receive complimentary information and a fuller picture of the possibilities.

4. Tell us about you; is this your first SAS Global Forum or are you a veteran? What are you most looking forward to in Las Vegas?

I have been an instructor with SAS Education for 17 years and teach courses in the Data Management and Data Integration curriculum. This will be my second year attending SAS Global Forum, but my first time in Las Vegas.

I most look forward to talking to customers about how they use or are thinking of using Hadoop and what role they foresee SAS having in working with their data in Hadoop.

To register for one of these courses, visit support.sas.com/training/sasglobalforum.