Just How Much Better Is Marimo Notebook Than SAS Enterprise Guide?

by Ian J. Ghent | Sep 3, 2025 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Marimo, Notebooks, Python

Enterprise Guide (EG) is the workhorse of SAS tools. Every day, thousands of citizen data scientists, analysts, data engineers and data scientists log-in and do much of their work from this tool. It was at the time (25+ years ago), one of the best designed tools for...

The Making Of An Analytics Crisis

by Ian J. Ghent | May 2, 2024 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python

I recently attended a fantastic conference on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery put on by DRI Canada. The keynote speaker, Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon was phenomenal. He founded the Cascade Institute, which studies crisis and the factors leading up to them. One key...

When did PySpark become THE modernization path for legacy SAS?

by Ian J. Ghent | Mar 2, 2023 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, 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....

What does a 100x improvement really look like?

by Ian J. Ghent | Sep 28, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python

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

by Luigi (Lou) Di Serio | Aug 16, 2022 | Apache Spark, Apache Spark Cafe, Python, SAS

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

by Ian J. Ghent | Jul 25, 2022 | Apache Spark Cafe, Cloud Computing, Python, SAS

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...