Unique tool

Hi all.

It seems to me that Unique alters the order of the rows (sorts them). I guess it's handy for the tool to sort for quick execution but I would rather preserve the original order of rows in some cases. It doesn't explicitly say that it sorts the rows. The same goes for summarize tool when you group by. What expectation do you have?

Best regards//Leif

Common Use Cases

Accepted answers

Ned

As others have pointed out, Alteryx needs to sort to perform the unique in the 1st place. Remember that Alteryx needs to work just as well with 10 billion records as it does with 10 records. The expense of putting the records back in order would be high and for people who don't need that, why bother?

That said, Alteryx is super flexible. I built a quick (rough) macro version of the unique tool that works you expect it. It is totally reasonable to do for smaller data sets. So enjoy this macro and then know that in the future it is pretty easy to make Alteryx work the way you want it to.

UniquePreservesSort.yxzp

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MarqueeCrew

Leif,

Imagine that you have a phone book sorted by phone number and you wanted to remove any duplicate addresses. The unique tool would sort by address to find the unique values.

In order to revert back, I would place a sort after the unique tool and put the data back in sort order. If before the unique you put a record id tool, then you would sort on record id and you're back in business.

Cheers,
Mark

engdell2

Thanks for your reply.

Yes, that is what I do when I need to preserve order, but I was more looking for a discussion on "is it is unreasonable to expect the row-order preserved" unless the tool explicitly says that it will "sort AND filter out duplicates".

Best regards//Leif

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