Alteryx Connect Ideas

Hello All,

We are new to Alteryx and we could see that the Supported Data Sources from IBM are of below :

• IBM DB2
• IBM Netezza/Pure Data Systems
• IBM SPSS

How about adding IBM Sterling to this?

We want Alteryx to support connection with IBM Sterling OMS which will help the Business requirements

Can anyone post some suggestions on this? How we can connect to Sterling?

Thanks,

Praveen C

Hello,

I'd like to suggest a "view as" on each page (like facebook) or a clear identifier that only certain people can view page. 

As an admin, I have to set permission setting for different group. It would be helpful to clearly see the permission setting as sometimes I forgot. 

Thank you.

If you remove the configuration of the SMTP server while you are in development, (the current solution to spamming users with notifications during the setup period of the data catalog) then put the SMTP server configuration back in when you are finished setup, all the changes that have happened in the interim will not be sent as a bulk send. This a risk when an email server is unavailable for a period of time that notifications for changes/comments/tasks will be missed.

Once the ability to switch notifications on and off is implemented, I think it would be worth reviewing how feasible this is.

The email notifications that are received are not easily marked or flagged/prefixed as coming from Alteryx. I expect that this may be on purpose so that data owners can't "hide" from changes/comments on their areas of expertise, but from a time management point of view, it would be good to be able to flag them in some way so that a rule can be run on them in the users inbox, and they can batch up their reviews/answers.

Unavailability of Connect during H2 DB backup (using backup button in administration console as described in documentation - https://help.alteryx.com/connect/current/Administration/DBBackup.htm?tocpath=Administer%7C_____8) while even View is not possible, no matter the capacity of Java Virtual Maschine, can be limiting while large number of data is stored (so backup and following rerun takes a lot of time).

Hello...We've found that when we assign an alternative name to an asset, the alternative name becomes the first name listed, and the main name becomes listed within parenthesis. Could this be reversed? As it's always best to have the main name of the asset listed first, then any alternative names/alias to be listed within the parenthesis. It creates visual order having it displayed this way. We've ended up not utilizing the alternative name functionality to avoid any confusion for our users. 

Currently - CustyID, CID(CUSTOMER_ID)

Request - CUSTOMER_ID(CustyID, CID)

Thanks!

Connect currently provides lineage for a datasource at the table level but we would like to be able to have this at a more granular level i.e. the column level so if a specific column changes in the table (e.g. data type change), we are notified of the change and able to identify quickly assets that will be affected.

@SeanAdams @revathi

Our client is considering introducing Alteryx Connect.

They are considering sharing metadata to thousands of users.
So it is not realistic for administrators to create accounts one by one.
Therefore, we want the function to import user lists.

Initially we considered connection with AD,
However, we could not be used because users and server of Alteryx Connect belong to different domains.

Therefore, we want the ability to import user lists.
Or, we want an extension to import account information in AD into Alteryx Connect.

If files/tables with the same name are registered, it is impossible to identify on the data sources list.
Our client would like a feature that to classify data sources by folder as like "All Schemas, Tables and Views".

Connect provides users an ability to Certify/Decertify asset or mark the asset as "Do Not Use". 

Problem Statement: Canvases are published to production gallery and scheduled when there is a need for the output without any single person dependency. but when the canvas output is no longer required, users not always remove the canvases or schedules from production gallery. 

Idea: In order to ensure the Server is utilized only for those canvases that are in use, we would like to have a re certification process of assets at regular intervals. eg. Re certification of a canvas required every 6 months from the date of publication to gallery. 

With Connect - we can request users to certify or decertify or mark as Do not use but we will not be able to capture or track the re certification of an asset.  

Ask: Functionality in Connect to recertify assets at regular intervals or ability to decertify assets in bulk based on the publication date, so that we can request the users to certify again.  

 cc: @SeanAdams @jalvarezv  @LizaNemchynova @AshwiniChezhiyan @Kosi

Currently, the Files Loader in Connect loads all files in a directory regardless of whether they are used in an asset (e.g Alteryx workflow, Tableau dashboard, etc). This becomes a problem when you have folders containing hundreds or even thousands of files that may not actually be linked in anyway to Alteryx or Tableau as those are all populated into Connect.

It would be beneficial if the Files loader was more selective about what files to load into the Connect UI by picking up file relationships discovered using the Alteryx and Tableau loaders for example.

We had an idea, when you have an yxdb file, you have all the metadata including the field descriptions column from previous formulas or selects, it would be so usefull to have that in connect so that you can easily write a dictionnary from alteryx designer.

I'm using HP Vertica as a data source of Tableau.

At this time I'm considering to install metadata management tool in my company.

But there is no name of HP Vertica on available list of Alteryx Connect.

I would be grateful if Alteryx could release a metadata loader of HP Vertica.

The share of Vertica increase gradually in Japan.

We're working through an implementation of Connect - and it appears that every time Connect scans the Alteryx or Tableau environment, it does a full reload of all canvasses / workbooks.

However - we have several thousand tableau dashboards & alteryx canvasses - so this creates a significant delay on running the loaders, and we'd want to run these loaders every few hours so that Connect has up-to-date information (or at most 24 hours out of date).    Running a full export and scan is causing this load to take a very long time to run.

Can we change the default behaviour for all the loaders to use a delta-load rather than doing a full scan - i.e. only pull out assets that have changed since the last load?

 cc: @nganesha @Kosi

When Alteryx connect is first installed to a company with a small alteryx designer base, you do not benefit from lineage.

There are not much workflows at hand. So in order to realize Alteryx connect's immediate benefits I'd like to suggest;

a company-wide Data Quality Score.

1. Let's score each data element in distributed data stores
2. And automatically give a simple scale between one and five
   • 1 equals to, “we don’t know”
   • 2 data is entered or updated prior to 1 year, has conflicting data
   • 3 would be the norm and means customer provided this data, as accurate and as up-to-date as they have entered it and ‘agreed’ to share with you.
   • 4 means we cross checked the data with 3rd party sources or the addresses work in Google Maps”.
   • 5 equals to “we had the customer or the representative validated the address in last 3 months”.
3. The scale will be based on;
   • Missingness
   • Information value (variance is high or not, if there is no variance no info useful thru the column)
   • How many times that column is addressed in other tables
   • Format (structured like a telephone number ###-##-## or semi structured like an address)
   • Is it an ID column
   • Is it a Datetime column, any discrepancies in date time columns etc.
   • Time since last update of data
4. Once we have some lineage information than we'll weight th data based on how frequently it's needed, how many formulas are requiring the field etc.

And as soon as we install connect we'll have a grand vision of our data and even we'll be able to track the status of our whole distributed data assets with a trend line if we are going better or worse... Here is an example;

We have some scheduled workflows that utilize the download tool for API calls. When we scrape them with connect there aren't any references to them in the "Relationships" or "Data Connections" areas.

Even if this is something that would be difficult for Alteryx to scrape through a workflow, I would love the ability to create entities like this and manually connect them as a data source. Like we have some partners where there 10 to 15 API calls are required to pull the entire data set. It would be great to know which workflows reference those APIs so that if changes are made on their side, we can easily identify which workflows are impacted.

I published a workflow today that scans a directory for files and then pushes them to a Dynamic Input. I noticed that on Connect there is no relationship there anywhere referencing that we are scraping a directory. 

Connect has the db inputs and outputs and the "File Input" that references what the Dynamic input is originally set to go find, but there is nothing referencing the directory other than any notes that I have added to the description. 

The reason that I think this may be important. We connect to a folder where FTP files are dumped by a powershell script and we want to go through that folder with Alteryx and pull and upload as needed. However the file that existed in the original input (when we created this workflow) no longer exists. So the visual relationship is broken in Connect as soon as that file is dropped. If perhaps we don't have a tool that references this sort of connection to a directory, having the ability to designate a dynamic connection to the original file might be good instead. We just want to be able for those in the future to reference a location, rather than a file that hasn't existed in a while.

Connect applies a standard set of weightings to different categories of information (people, terms etc.) when returning search results. When combined with likes/dislikes, these determine the order in which results are returned - details below:

Alteryx Connect uses the following scoring parameters for the Lucene engine:

• Likes and Dislikes, using the following formula: (Number of Likes) / (Number of Likes + Number of Dislikes).
• Certified assets: +1.2
• Person: +2.4
• Term: +2.2
• Report: +2
• Report sheet: +1.8
• Alteryx workflow: +1.5
• Table: +1.4

It would be useful to have control over this weighting, e.g. when you have large numbers of Person records being returned before Terms; but advice from Customer Support has been that these are not currently customisable. I'd like to request that this ability be considered for inclusion in a future release of Connect.

Clicking the ‘Use in Workflow’ button in connect downloads a workflow file with the Table which I can open in Alteryx Designer.

When I open in Alteryx it asks for Userid/PW but there is no option for SSO (single sign on):

If I leave the username and password blank then the connection fails and I get an error.

In the case of SSO the connection string should be:

SSO:  odbc:Driver={HDBODBC};SERVERNODE=saphXXX.europe.company.com:30415;Trusted_connection=yes;

instead of this: 

UseridPW:  odbc:Driver={HDBODBC};SERVERNODE=saphXXX.europe.company.com:30415;UID=USERNAME;PWD=__EncPwd1__

Please note ALL of our users use SSO so current functionality is useless to us.

I have raised this as a bug with support but as usual they ask me to post here.

This option should also ask if the connection is In-DB connection also per this post:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Connect-Ideas/Have-In-Db-input-as-an-option-when-selecting-...