Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas
Share your Designer Desktop product ideas - we're listening!Submitting an Idea?
Be sure to review our Idea Submission Guidelines for more information!
Submission GuidelinesI reported this to the support team but was told it was by design and to post here.
In-DB Inefficient SQL
I would like to report that the In-DB tools are generating horribly inefficient SQL code for simple operations. It seems no matter what tools you use every statement is starting with a nested 'Select * From'.
Example Simple workflow:
This is a simple Select and Group by but the SQL Generated is:
SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit"
FROM (SELECT * FROM "_SYS_BIC"."shell.app.gsap.FL000_LSC.FL002_CTS.INT.RPT/CA_CTS_RPT_MAIN_001") AS "a"
GROUP BY "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name"
This is taking a very long time to execute:
Statement 'SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit" FROM ...'
successfully executed in 15.752 seconds (server processing time: 15.699 seconds)
Whereas if I take the same query and remove the nested Select *:
SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit"
FROM "_SYS_BIC"."shell.app.gsap.FL000_LSC.FL002_CTS.INT.RPT/CA_CTS_RPT_MAIN_001" AS "a"
GROUP BY "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name"
It is very quick:
Statement 'SELECT "ShipTo", "ShipTo_Name", SUM("ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit") AS "Sum_ECM_3PL_OVERHEADS_Unit" FROM ...'
successfully executed in 1.211 seconds (server processing time: 1.157 seconds)
So Alteryx is generating queries up to x13 slower than they should be thereby defeating the point of using In-DB. As you can imagine in a workflow where we have multiple Connect In-DB tools this is a really substantial amount of time. Example used above is from SAP HANA DB has 1.9m rows and ~90 columns but we have much bigger tables/views than this.
If you look you will see its same behaviour for all In-DB tools where each tool creates another nested Select with its particular operator.
MY SUGGESTION:
So my suggestion is that Alteryx should combine the SQL of the first few tools and avoid using SELECT * completely unless no Select tools have been used. So it should combine:
- Connect In-DB + Select
- Connect In-DB + Filter
- Connect In-DB + Summarise
Preferably it should combine/flatten everything up until the first join or union. But Select + Filter are a must!
Note it seems some DB's can cope OK with un-nesting these big nested queries in the query plans for some Tables but normally not for Views. But some cannot cope at all and so the In-DB tools cannot even be used to Browse 100 records (due to select *).
