Join While Performing Spatial Operations

[_richardr]

When using spatial processing tools please add the abilty to join between the target and universe based on a field.  This field based join could be used to narrow the geographies prior to performing spatial tests thus greatly improving processing time.

[Ned]

It wouldn't save as much time as you might think because the engine would still have to look up potential matches in the spatial index.

You can get the exact behavior you are looking for by picking "Bounding Rectangle Overlaps" in the spatial match - which does the minimal spatial filtering and then follow it up with 2 filter tools.  Unfortunately the formula syntax won't shortcut on an OR - it will still process both sides, so in order to get the speedup you would need 2.  The 1st one could filter on your non-spatial criteria, the second on the spatial criteria.

All that said thogh, good feature suggestion, it would be easier if integrated.  Thank you.

[_richardr]

It would be faster if Alteryx regenerated the index and included both the spatial and non-spatial indexes to create the index.  Not sure if Alteryx has the ablity to have more than one item in the index but other databases do.  This could be moot if it takes longer to generate a combined index than it does to process it but would be useful for static datasets that don't change.

Has anyone come up with a way to share Alteryx routines in psudocode?  It would be great if we could get the code from a module in a form that was easy to review and share.  The XML behind a module process is just too involved for me to desypher quickly.

[KenB]

| It wouldn't save as much time as you might think because the engine would still have to look up potential matches in the spatial index.

I disagree.  I have put together a macro that uses another batch macro with a spatial match for doing a join on a user-specified field.
Target records: 16.7M.  Universe records: 11.1M.
Using Alteryx Spatial Match (followed by a filter on the join field to eliminate any boundary overlaps) takes approx 12 hrs to get to approx 52% (I gave up waiting).
My macro with the same inputs and join field specified (and no output filter needed) took 2:12 hours to finish!

It's not as nice as the Alteryx Spatial Match tool since I can't really get a field selection interface into it (for the output fields) and therefore it needs to be followed up with a selection tool to properly name the universe join and spatial fields after processing through the macro.  Not a bad trade-off for hours saved.

Looking forward to an Alteryx version with an output field selection section.

Ken