When dealing with very large tables (100M rows plus), it's not always practical to bring the entire table back to the designer to profile and understand the data.
It would be very useful if the power of the field summary tool (frequency analysis; evaluating % nulls; min & max values; length of strings; evaluating if the type is appropriate or could be compressed; whether there is whitespace before or after) could be brought to large DB tables without having to bring the whole table back to the client.
Given that each of these profiling tasks can be done as a discrete SQL query; I would think that this would be MASSIVELY faster than doing this client-side; but it would be a bit of a pain to write this tool.
If there is interest in this - I'm more than happy to work with the Alteryx team to look at putting together an initial mockup.
Cheers
Sean
