Alteryx Designer slow when conencted to SQL database

[jacques993]

Alteryx is very slow - (30 seconds) to click on any tool in the flow when connected to the SQL database, its as if its polling the database for every click.

Can this behaviour be changed?

Thanks, Ryan 

[JoeS · Accepted solution]

Hi @jacques993

You can change this in a couple ways. What you are experiencing is the auto-configure option of Alteryx.

Each time you update a tool the rest of the workflow auto-configures in order to know what metadata (aka fields) are available.

I'd imagine there is a bit of latency on your connection to SQL, which is the lag you are seeing.

You can either right click and cache the input tool, thus not pinging the SQL server each time anymore.

Or you can disable the auto configure function within the user settings > edit user settings > advanced > disable auto-configure.

However this will require you to press F5 in order to do the refresh manually.

[jacques993]

Brill, Thanks! Thats done it! On the back of this, I have multiple flows going to multiple tables - is there a way to just have 1 sql output tool instead of 10 or so?

[JoeS]

Glad to hear it!

If the data is in the same structure you could use a union tool to collect together the 10 streams and have a field with the relevant table name for each record.

There then is the option at the bottom of the output tool to "Take File/Table Name From Field" you can then use this to create the table name and output dynamically to the require tables.

If they are different structures I think the best way would be to have the separate output tools. It's going to be the most straightforward and also be a visual representation of what is happening so helps on that front too.