Spark Café Blog

Discover More About Analytics Modernization

Putting A Price On Technical Debt – For One Canadian Bank It May Be A $13.4B Deal

Many people have heard of TD Bank Group’s attempted acquisition of First Horizon, and the subsequent collapse of that deal. With recent turmoil in the banking system, one might assume that the collapse of the deal had something to do with those developments. It would...

What Would Happen If Oracle Buys SAS?

I often like to think in the hypothetical, thought experiments if you will. What if, at this very moment SAS was hammering out the final details of a deal to sell itself to Oracle. This might seem a far fetched notion to some, but I assure you that it is not only in...

When did PySpark become THE modernization path for legacy SAS?

Back in 2015, when my colleagues and I first started reading about and experimenting with Apache Spark and PySpark, we knew there was something special brewing in open analytics. Being in the data and analytics world since 1997, I’ve seen lots of trends come and go....

The 50% Upfront Scam

We’re increasingly hearing from customers about a common scheme being perpetrated by some of the largest SI’s and IT service vendors on the planet. In the sketchy world of IT body shops, it is common practice to ask for 50% upfront and 50% upon completion of a...

The Tradeoff Between Being Simple and Being Right

At WiseWithData, our engineers have developed the most sophisticated automation on the planet to transpile code from one language to another. Weighing in at over 500,000 lines, SPROCKET is simultaneously a marvel of simplicity, elegance and complexity. Complexity,...

Top 10 Ways To Spot A Modernization Imposter

My son loves Among Us, the wildly successful computer game released in 2018 by Innersloth, a team of only 3 developers at the time. Personally, I love the story of Innersloth and Among Us, as it shows how a small but passionate team of people can change the world. My...

The SAS Migration Torture Test

In the Additive Manufacturing & 3D Printing world, a “torture test” is often used to test the limits and capabilities of a 3D printer. There are many different designs out there, but they all aim to capture just how capable is the automated machine. For filament...

What does a 100x improvement really look like?

I’m often called upon to provide guidance on why adopting modern analytics is so important. In 2022, all the best features and functionality are in the open source world, especially the market leading Databricks and the PySpark language. Those capabilities are...

My Tumultuous, Sometimes Frustrating Yet Thrilling Journey from SAS to Python and PySpark

Mental Illness and Obsolete Skills October 2019 was the beginning of a very difficult and dark period for me. In truth, the decline began like a slow-motion train wreck during Christmas of 2018, but the main crisis point and collapse was triggered in October 2019. In...

Planning a Prison Break – Breaking Free of Vendor Lock-in

It seems like everything these days is only for rent. The way we consume movies, music, books, computing, even the features in our cars, have all moved to be subscription model services, not products you buy and own. Pay once, own forever has increasingly become pay...

Foolishly Automating Or Automating Fools

What an absurd title! A strange twist on the “working hard or hardly working” cliché, but read on and I promise it will all make sense. Here's a tale of a court jester and his great invention. Long ago in a vast and complex kingdom, there lived a great king. The king...

Why R is not ouR target – problems with the open source SAS competitor

Back in 2015, when we set out to build SPROCKET, the World's only SAS modernization solution, one key design question plagued our thoughts. Scalable, simple, fast and open-source, it was obvious from the early days of Apache Spark that it was analytics platform of the...

Why the RIPL API has been 12 years in the making

Not to date myself, but I’ve been using SAS for over 25 years. I’ve worked at banks like Capital One and Citibank, Telecom companies like Verizon and Bell Canada, government institutions like Statistics Canada, and the company behind the SAS language. In all my years...

What is automation?

During engagements with our clients I am often asked what is our definition of automation. Understanding the options that are available on the market today to help with a SAS code conversion can be challenging. We often hear and use the terms brute force, manual,...

What stupid things you can do in SAS but shouldn’t

SAS is the Kapil Dev(Cricket) of computer programming languages. For my non cricket friends, what I mean is it was the best alrounder of its time. Google says ‘SAS language is a computer programming language used for statistical analysis’ but I bet someone has used it...

What is SPROCKET SearchParty? How does it work?

Apr 27, 2020

I would like to introduce you to SPROCKET SearchParty, the first step in the SPROCKET automated migration solution. What is SPROCKET SearchParty? SPROCKET SearchParty plays an important function in planning your SAS to PySpark code conversion. It identifies and...

What is SPROCKET Robot? How does it work?

Apr 20, 2020

This blog post serves as an introduction to the WiseWithData core SPROCKET Robot code conversion tool. For more information on the SPROCKET automated migration solution (SPROCKET Search Party, SPROCKET Robot, SPROCKET Validator), please get in touch with us at...

Is SAS still relevant?

Jun 08, 2016

I'm increasingly being asked the same question in a number of different ways. Essentially the question boils down to this; Given that open-source analytics, and Apache Spark in particular have become such a force to be reckoned with, does SAS still have any relevance?...