Designer Performance with Many Columns

Question

Hi everyone,

I've noticed that Designer's performance significantly decreases, not with the number of records (ie rows), but with the number of columns (ie Fields)

Anyone got suggestions on how to improve performance or is this inherent problem with Designer?

I am dealing with datasets with about 1,000 columns, and reducing the number of columns is not permissible for business reasons.

Also, rotating the table doesn't work, because the dataset has many more rows than columns.

Thanks!

Side note: I think SQL has similar problems. Microsoft SQL has a hard limit of 1024 columns. MySQL limit is 4,000 but InnoDB further imposes limit of 1,017 columns. I am guessing Designer face similar problems, be great if someone can explain the column limits for Alteryx.

TimN · Answer

One thing you can do if you haven't already is run Performance Profiling.  This will tell you what tools are taking longest and possibly give you ideas on how to speed things up.  Here's a link that describes this.

https://www.useready.com/blog/turbocharging-alteryx-performance/

WeiLi · Answer

what I meant to ask is... given the issue with large number of columns and performance degradation is community knowledge, is there something that can be done? like disabling or enabling certain features?

basically, if reducing the number of columns is being ruled out, what tricks can be done to improve performance?

CoG · Answer

Here is another community post that speaks a little to the issue that you're describing: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Desktop-Discussions/Column-Limit/td-p/304332