Profile results unclear

Question

Dear community,

As a starting user of Alteryx, I am puzzled by the behavior of the Profile in a Browse tool. In my super simple analysis I determine the length of a field with following Profile result:

The profile tells me I am having approx. 8.2M records in my data set, but the distinct values for length of the field in that dataset (between 2 and 18 characters) adds up to approx. 5.5M records. Seems there is data missing for about 2.7M records. Generating the profile costs a lot of calculation time, but the information presented seems incomplete. I have seen somewhere in the community the result is capped at 300MB, but if that is happening should there not be a visible hint of that fact being given? What gives?

Hope somebody can throw some light on this, am using Designer version 2020.4.

Cheers,

Arjan

ArjanF · Answer

That might all be true, but, in my humble opinion, the software should give some visual guidance to that fact (assuming data volume is triggering this behavior). With the implementation in 2020.4 I get no (visible) feedback the results are unreliable as profile is not created on the full dataset! That is by itself very bad as unaware users will reach the wrong conclusion as I initially did. Again, in my humble opinion, either show a full and correct result, or don't show a result (but a message pertaining to the data size) as the current potential partial result leaves users guessing at the correctness of the Profile information.

Is there somewhere a feature request / bug fix section where this can be brought to the developers of Alteryx?

Kind regards,

ArjanF

apathetichell · Answer

Honestly - I'd chalk it up to limits of Browse.

For this amount of data you should be using something like Field Summary to get analysis. Clearly the data is there and the machine isn't cutting anything out - as the summarize functions are working properly.

ArjanF · Answer

Hi apathetichell,

Total amount of records is not the problem, memory on my end should also not be the problem as I am running on a 16 GB machine, should be enough I believe.

I made a picture to point it out more clearly I hope.

Kind regards,

ArjanF