Hello FME friends,

After a week away, here's a very full edition of What's Up Wednesday.

Certification Program Updates

As of this week, you'll notice major changes to our FME Certification program. Firstly, there is a new trail on the FME Academy to help you learn the required skills to pass the exam:

Yes, that says 62 hours, but that's if you are starting from scratch with no FME skills. If you're considering certification, I expect that you would have completed many of these modules already, or have the equivalent amount of training and/or experience.

Secondly, the FME Certification exams are now being "proctored". This means that automated software monitors your exam to ensure the right person is taking the test and does not receive outside help.

It's not that we don't trust you, but we think certifications have more value when carried out under secure conditions like this. It also lets us process your applications quickly and provide interactive help during the exam.

The downside is that there is now a cost of $150 to take each test. You can read more about the exam in our knowledge base article, and ask specific questions by emailing fmecertifications@safe.com

Community Surveys

Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey about a crowdsourced FME Best Practices guide. It's very clear that the preferred format is articles on the Knowledge Base:

It's less clear, but the style choice is "articles" over a "step-by-step" guide, which is good because I don't want to turn this into training materials. I'll get in touch shortly with everyone who responded - and will leave the survey open for a while in case anyone else still wants to get involved.

I don't want to overload you with surveys, but I do have another one now for you to contribute to. This is a mini-survey about future community engagement activities.

Basically, I'd like to know which community resources and events over the last year were useful for you. Did you like the Sneak Peek videos? Did you vote in the Favourite Transformer contest? Which parts of What's Up Wednesday are of most use to you?

So take this short survey. Then once I know what was useful, I can make sure to do more of it!

Raster Mosaicking

Here's your tech tip for the week. A user asked, why does my raster shift after using the RasterMosaicker transformer?

The answer is that the first feature to reach the transformer determines the grid to be used. All subsequent features are resampled and snapped to match that grid. So when your raster features have slightly different spacing and resolutions, make sure the correct one is first into the transformer.

You can even create a "dummy" raster, empty of data, using the RasterRGB/RasterNumericCreator transformers, to define the correct grid; as long as it arrives first to the RasterMosaicker.

Also, be aware, as the above image shows, there are parameters to control exactly how snapping and resampling take place.

Order of Operations

Abley in New Zealand has published its latest Fireside Chat video, which is all about the Order of Operations in an FME Workspace.

As they note, it's important to know about this because it affects the optimization and performance of your workspace. A workspace with transformers in the correct order can run way faster than the same set of transformers in a different order!

The video even gets the Dale Lutz seal of approval!

So check out the video and learn about how transformer - and feature - order, can be manipulated to help your workspace performance.

FME, Google Analytics, and Snowflake

Still in New Zealand - which is a real hotbed of FME activity right now - we have a blog post from Locus about automating reports from Google Analytics by using FME.

This is a user story about the New Zealand Department of Conservation. They're improving business intelligence and reporting using a Snowflake-based cloud data warehouse. With FME's help, they are now able to read Google Analytics reports through an API, and upload them to the Snowflake warehouse.

A quote from the team shows the importance: "With the help of FME and its easy integration with Snowflake, we have been able to overhaul what was a manual, irregular Google Analytics reporting process and transform it into a reliable, accessible source of integrated data."

Reviewing FME Workspaces... with FME

On LinkedIn, Matthieu Vrakking writes about how to maintain standards of workspace, which is something we might consider as part of our Best Practice guide. Anyway, Matthieu created a setup that uses the FMW format reader in FME to read and analyze workspace content:

This isn't exactly a new technique. I've seen it done before and even used that in my Best Practices analyzer (a project that isn't dead yet, but not as alive as it should be). But Matthieu takes it a step further by making it an automation on FME Server.

The automation listens for a system event - specifically a workspace published to a repository - then runs the assessment workspace to check it. Any problems are reported via email.

I think this is a wonderful project. This sort of thing should be standard for any large organization that uses FME Server! Nice work, Matthieu.

Miscellaneous News

I'm running out of space for a forum question, so check out the What's Up post on LinkedIn, where I'm not so constrained. But in brief, be sure to check out:

• A newly scheduled webinar on Best Practices for Optimizing Jobs on FME Server
• A blog on FME and Data Mining
• The Hub contents summary for September
• Build 2022.1.3, released last week
• A new article on Load Balancing Concepts for FME in the Cloud
• Safe at the Augmented Enterprise Summit, in San Diego next week