Alteryx Connect Ideas

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;

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-...

Would Alteryx please consider putting a "notes" page for gallery apps.  This would help the developer of the apps give notes and "how-to's" to the users.  

It would be great to have metadata loader support for Snowflake.  My organization is seriously considering it as our data platform of choice, as many others are. 

Our use case has Snowflake as a data lake, and having good data discovery and governance tools is paramount to data lake adoption.  We would like Connect to be that tool.

ALteryx does a great thing for offering free trial licences for those that want to do a job change/are out of job for alteryx designer. But is it possible to expand that to alteryx cloud products too?

After loss of data on our client's Alteryx Connect instance, we started to think about regular automated backup of the Connect (or at least of the H2 database). It would be great if this was implemented in Connect (currently we have to do it manually) and we won't need to writte an extra script.

Thank you very much for consideration of this feature!
Best Regards,

JanK

Hello,

It would be very beneficial from an end-user experience if we could provide more information on the Tool Details portion in Connect. Below is an example:

In Connect it tells us a filter tool is used and the expression. What's missing is a title if one is supplied in Designer. This would be incredibly beneficial as this will provide more context to the end user why an expression was used. Below is what's found in the Designer:

If a Name field can also be brought over it will help provide more meaning to the Expression.  

Thanks!

Jason

Hello!
I have a potential feature enhancement for the database-based Metadata Loaders. This has been tested with the PostgresSQL loaders, however I suspect this is something that is reflected across all database loaders.

This suggestion is simply for constraints of the fields to be brought into connect, with the names of the fields. So for instance the following:

is visible in Connect as:

What would be nice is two additional columns, 'Not Null' and 'Primary Key'. Or alternatively, a 'constraints' column, that contains these constraints, so that it does not have to be documented manually following an import.


Thanks,
TheOC

Our customers face up with asset name limitation – 200 chars.

This number of chars is not enough in many cases when they describe glossary terms.

Please extend this limit at least twice (to 400 chars)

Hello,

Could you make saving filter settings inside folders for each user individually?

We a have a lot of terms and other assets, and when user works with his own assets he would like to return to folder with last filter settings.

Otherwise user has to set up filters again.

Virtual folders are not convenient because if each of thousand users will create his own virtual folder(s) it will be hard to navigate inside thousands of virtual folders.

Hi Alteryx Team,

I would like to suggest an improvement in the Alteryx Connect connect_catalina log file.

Currently, the log file contains only a timestamp and in order to get to a date + time combination, it is necessary to use the name of the file itself. Would it be possible to include the date information directly into the log? The use case is for example an integration with log monitoring tools. I am working closely with a monitoring team on a project and their feedback was, that it would be much easier to implement the integration with the date directly next to the timestamp.

Thank you very much for considering this idea.

Kind regards,

Jan

 Please provide a configuration option to make the DB_TABLES.TABLE_COMMENT for views appear in Discovered Description like it does for tables instead of in Technical Annotation.

It would be great if the File loader could recognize the SQL file extension to read and display the SQL script in Connect. An example would be similar to how the DDL is visible when you look at views in Data Sources. This would provide a large benefit when researching overall data usage and mapping to other data sources and workflows.

When I add descriptions to tables or columns in Connect then use that asset in a workflow, I would like to see the same table and column descriptions within the metadata in Designer. To illustrate, I've shared some screenshots...

It would be very useful to have a standard metadata loader for chained workflows or apps.

Currently the Crew Macro Conditional runner or the Alteryx Event/CMD based workflow/app chaining or the chaining from interface designer do not have a corresponding metadata loader. 

At the moment the only option of creating a nexus for chained apps or workflows is to manually create the links between various assets and workflows. This can be highly tedious depending on the number of workflows/apps being chained, inputs and outputs involved in each workflow and also error prone.

This creates a sort of blindspots in terms of end-to-end metadata management and showing true lineage when using chained Alteryx apps/workflows.

As the chaining of workflows and apps is a major timesaver and helpful tool to break down larger jobs into smaller manageable jobs it would be massively useful to have a corresponding metadata loader.

Many thanks,

Gourab

The Alteryx Connect loader (found under help / sample workflows etc...) is set up to be run in interactive mode as an analytical app.

However; on any installation of a reasonable size - these loaders will be scheduled to run without user intervention.

Given the fact that Analytical Apps are not easy to schedule (given the interactive nature of the inputs) - it makes sense to provide a version of the loader that is ready out-the-box to be scheduled and run hands-free (built and tested as a yxmc file).

Many thanks

Sean

Hi Alteryx team,

Currently, Alteryx Server loader is pulling quite a several different types of information (e.g. date uploaded, number of runs, last run date, published version etc.).

Would it be possible to add the information about the workflow schedule? It would contain the frequency of how often it is scheduled to run on the server (if applicable), for others, it can be "not scheduled" or something.

Thank you

Michal

In the Alteryx Gallery we have the ability to place workflows in Districts or Collections. This structure should be maintained in Connect. Similar to how Data sources are managed, instead of Data Source Servers, you have an area to select and filter by the various collections and districts in which workflows are contained.

Alteryx notifies thumbs up but does not notify the owner of a thumbs down.... We think this makes sense to have as consistent so that the owner can follow up on issues with the asset, and/or have it removed.