We learned so much and had so much fun at SAS Innovate 2024. So many activities, so many announcements. We're going to try and cover as many highlights as we can in May's rendition of the SAS Bowl.   Game Details The SAS Support Community trivia event, SAS Bowl XL, SAS Innovate 2024 - Recap is scheduled for Wednesday, May 15, at 10 a.m. ET. Register for the event and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event. On game day, join the Teams meeting and access the game here.   More on SAS Innovate Highlights Starting off the week was the SAS Hackathon Boot Camp and education workshops. Wednesday started off with the general session and then breakout sessions in the afternoon. At any point you could visit the Innovation Hub. The activities in the Hub are too numerous to count. You could attend one of the scores of Super Demos, visit a booth, get your virtual bobble head made, etc. Watching SAS CTO, Bryan Harris, burn his taste bud on hot wings was also a highlight. And finally, all the technology announcements, including: SAS Viya Workbench, SAS Viya Copilot, SAS Enterprise Guide on SAS Viya, and so many more.   Weren't able to make it to SAS Innovate? Here's a link to On-Demand sessions (registration required). You can watch all the general sessions as well as some select breakout session. SAS Innovate 2024 On-Demand   SAS Bowl and event details For those who may be new to the SAS Bowl, you can find game history and specifics in this Community memo. There you'll also find links to previous events, which include recordings.   Register for the event and receive an invite with game details and a Teams meeting link. On game day, Join the TEAMS meeting to play, and show off your SAS and worldly knowledge while competing for bragging rights and SAS Community game gear. ... View more

Hello SAS Innovate Hub,   It's gone by many names in the past, SUGI, SAS Global Forum, SAS Explore, but this year we're dubbing our annual conference, SAS Innovate. The event is a data and AI experience for business leaders, technical users and SAS partners. The conference is scheduled for April 16-19, in Las Vegas. We're dedicating the March edition of the SAS Bowl to get you prepared for the event. We'll also travel back to past events and dig up some highlights.   The next game is scheduled for Wednesday, March 20 at 10am EST. See the event info with instructions for how to register and join . It's fun to play and there are prizes for the winners!   About the SAS Bowl Trivia game Hosted by your SAS Support Communities team, the SAS Bowl is a fun way to interact with your fellow SAS users and compete for a chance to win swag and bragging rights. You'll join an interactive meeting in Microsoft Teams, then play trivia alongside (in your browser) with the special Engage Trivia app from SAS.   Learn More about SAS Innovate At SAS Innovate, there's something for everyone and every role – from top executives to data scientists, engineers, and analysts to our partners across industries. Whether you’re flying solo or heading to Vegas with your entire team, it's a no-risk, all-reward opportunity to learn how to succeed with AI and analytics. Give us four days at SAS Innovate, and we know you’ll be all in on AI, too. Here are some resources to learn more about SAS Innovate to prepare for the SAS Bowl. SAS Innovate 2024 home page SAS Innovate 2024 Communities page Meet our inspiring keynote speakers at SAS Innovate 2024   How to join the game Before game time, register for the Microsoft Teams event here. At game time you will join this meeting with your trivia host and your fellow players.   To play the game, open https://si.sas.com/sasbowl in a browser window and join with a nickname (preferably your SAS communities user name). Your host will lead the game in the meeting while you submit your answers and watch the leaderboard in your browser. You can find more details about this game and SAS Bowl Trivia at the SAS Communities site. ... View more

It's gone by many names in the past, SUGI, SAS Global Forum, SAS Explore, but this year we're dubbing our annual conference, SAS Innovate. The event is a data and AI experience for business leaders, technical users and SAS partners. The conference is scheduled for April 16-19, in Las Vegas. We're dedicating the March edition of the SAS Bowl to get you prepared for the event. We'll also travel back to past events and dig up some highlights.   Game Details The SAS Support Community trivia event, SAS Bowl XXXIX, SAS Innovate 2024 is scheduled for Wednesday, March 20, at 10 a.m. ET. Register for the event and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event. On game day, join the Teams meeting and access the game here.   More on SAS Innovate At SAS Innovate, there's something for everyone and every role – from top executives to data scientists, engineers, and analysts to our partners across industries. Whether you’re flying solo or heading to Vegas with your entire team, it's a no-risk, all-reward opportunity to learn how to succeed with AI and analytics. Give us four days at SAS Innovate, and we know you’ll be all in on AI, too. Here are some resources to learn more about SAS Innovate to prepare for the SAS Bowl. SAS Innovate 2024 home page SAS Innovate 2024 Communities page Meet our inspiring keynote speakers at SAS Innovate 2024 More resources coming soon   SAS Bowl and event details For those who may be new to the SAS Bowl, you can find game history and specifics in this Community memo. There you'll also find links to previous events, which include recordings.   Register for the event and receive an invite with game details and a Teams meeting link. On game day, Join the TEAMS meeting to play, and show off your SAS and worldly knowledge while competing for bragging rights and SAS Community game gear. ... View more

Happy Valentine's Day. Although SAS Bowl XXXVIII has nothing to do with the day, we'd LOVE to tell you about something new. The topic for February's edition is the new SAS Programming: Getting Started course offered by SAS.   Game Details The SAS Support Community trivia event, SAS Bowl XXXVIII, SAS Programming: Getting Started is scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, at 10 a.m. ET. Register for the event and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event. On game day, join the Teams meeting and access the game here.   More on the Getting Started courses This course will get you started on how to write SAS code. Oh, and did we mention the course is FREE. Don't have time to take the course? Well, if you're already a SAS programmer you may be all set. We'll be asking questions on importing and exporting data, general SAS coding rules, and popular SAS procedures. Below are a few resources to get you started. SAS Programming: Getting Started, a Free Learning Journey - Community article with an overview of the course Explore and Visualize: Getting Started - Introductory course for SAS Visualization SAS Analytics: Getting Started - Introductory course for SAS Analytics   SAS Bowl and event details For those who may be new to the SAS Bowl, you can find game history and specifics in this Community memo. There you'll also find links to previous events, which include recordings.   Register for the event and receive an invite with game details and a Teams meeting link. On game day, Join the TEAMS meeting to play, and show off your SAS and worldly knowledge while competing for bragging rights and SAS Community game gear. ... View more

The SAS Customer Recognition Awards (CRA) were created to recognize and reward SAS customers and partners who help us change the world through analytics. The awards will recognize customers for their stand-out contributions over the past year. We want to celebrate you and the SAS Communities team is dedicating the next SAS Bowl to the SAS Customer Recognition Awards.   Game Details The SAS Support Community trivia event, SAS Bowl XXXVII, SAS Customer Recognition Awards is scheduled for Wednesday, January 10, at 10 a.m. ET. Register for the event and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event. On game day, join the Teams meeting and access the game here.   More on the SAS Customer Recognition Awards Join us at SAS Innovate, April 16-19, 2024 in Las Vegas, NV where we will honor the award winners. Each first-place winner will receive registration and travel for one person to attend SAS Explore. A trophy and SAS swag are also up for grabs! Award categories include: SAS Analytics Explorers Advocate, Community Uplift Award, Innovative Problem Solver, ROI Rockstar, and Curious Thinker. Refer to the links below to learn more about the CRAs and prepare for the trivia event.   SAS Customer Recognition Awards - SAS Communities CRA page 2024 SAS Customer Recognition Awards Community Memo - all the CRA 411 for 2024 SAS Customer Recognition Awards (2023) - SAS Communities CRA page recapping 2023 entries Winners - 2023 SAS Customer Recognition Awards - SAS Communities CRA page highlighting 2023 winners 2023 Customer Recognition Awards eBook - eBook with information on each winner   SAS Bowl and event details For those who may be new to the SAS Bowl, you can find game history and specifics in this Community memo. There you'll also find links to previous events, which include recordings.   Register for the event and receive an invite with game details and a Teams meeting link. On game day, Join the TEAMS meeting to play, and show off your SAS and worldly knowledge while competing for bragging rights and SAS Community game gear.   ... View more

Your SAS Viya administrator is tasked with setting up authentication and authorization mechanisms for you to access SAS. Whether that be Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Security Assertions Markup Language (SAML), Single Sign On (SSO), or through some other technology, once set up, you log into the SAS GUI, and voilà you're off and running in the SAS application.   But what if you want to expand your possibilities, and say, create test cases in Postman or a Jupyter Notebook. Or create an application on top of SAS Viya? Authentication and authorization in this case is done through the use of access tokens. In this Juletip, I'll outline the steps to generate the access token and provide links to other resources for more details. I'll keep this at a pretty high level to not get buried in the weeds.   The Technology Registering clients and generating access tokens follow the OpenID Connect (OIDC) and the User Account and Authentication server (UAA) industry standards (with some customizations specifically for SAS. I won't get into the details of OAuth 2.0, OIDC or UAA here. You can read more about them in @MikeRoda's SAS Global Forum paper OpenID Connect Opens the Door to SAS Viya APIs.   The Client First, since you'll be connecting to SAS Viya from the outside, you have to tell SAS who you are. This is done through the creation of a client id. This is a one-time administrative task. Once a client is registered it does not expire or time out. Authentication and authorization are controlled by the scopes and authorities parameters and grant types. SAS Viya supports multiple grant types. Here we'll focus on the user-based authorization code. To learn more about the other grant types, see my SAS User's blog post Authentication to SAS Viya: a couple of approaches.    The Access Token Once the client is registered, the admin would provide the client id to a developer. The developer uses the client id along with their user credentials to generate an authorization code. Next, the authorization code is used to generate an access (and refresh) token. The access token will expire after a specified time-to-live (TTL). You can use the refresh token to generate a new access token.   Once you have the access token, you pass this along with the REST call or when connecting to CAS and you're now connected to SAS Viya from an external client.   Additional Resources In addition to the links in the sections above, here are a few more resources of interest.   Scripts to register client and generate access tokens I've written an interactive Jupyter Notebook that walks you through the entire process described above. It is located on sassoftware GitHub. This repository also contains multiple common SAS Viya use cases, written in Postman, Python, and R.    The SAS Developers Community Have questions? Want more information? Visit the SAS Developers Community and see what's being talked about.   The SAS Developers Portal All API documentation, integration with open source, and building applications on top of SAS is located on the SAS Developers Portal, developer.sas.com. Please note that this site is being replaced with a new, updated version and will temporarily be found at developers.sas.com. We are targeting the end of the year to release the new site. The two sites will live side-by-side for a time.   ... View more

Simulating data is a common tool data scientists and analysts use often.  Model selection can depend on the distribution of the data. Being able to simulate large data sets quickly is a great way to solve this problem. We'll dive deeper into data simulation in SAS Bowl XXXVI.   Game Details The SAS Support Community trivia event, SAS Bowl XXXVI, Data Simulation is scheduled for Wednesday, December 13, at 10 a.m. ET. Register for the event and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event. On game day, join the Teams meeting and access the game here.   More on Data Simulation SAS enables you to quickly create large data sets drawn from different distributions. Understanding the distribution is key to knowing your data and selecting your best modeling options. But data simulation takes planning. You want to follow best practices and create efficient simulations and avoid programming pitfalls.   Here are a few resources you can review for the game. Simulation SAS blog posts - @Rick_SAS has written a book on the subject; much of the material can be found in his blog posts 10 Tips for Simulating Data With SAS - SAS Ask the Expert Webinar by @Rick_SAS  Use SAS to Quickly Simulate and Graph Data from Different Distributions - Communities article by @BethEbersole  - there's a complimentary video as well Creating Simulated Data Sets - SAS Users blog post by @Ron_Cody - there's a part 2 as well Using SAS Viya to Simulate Data -  a short video on simulating data in SAS Viya   SAS Bowl and event details For those who may be new to the SAS Bowl, you can find game history and specifics in this Community memo. There you'll also find links to previous events, which include recordings.   Register for the event and receive an invite with game details and a Teams meeting link. On game day, Join the TEAMS meeting to play, and show off your SAS and worldly knowledge while competing for bragging rights and SAS Community game gear.   ... View more