Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Hi,

I was told this feature is working as intended/designed, so I decided to post an idea to see if there was interest in the feature I'm looking for.

In debugging a workflow that another Alteryx user at my company was developing, we realized that an in-db connection was inadvertently pointing to the wrong environment.  Because of how in-db tools output messages, there wasn’t anything visual pointing to this as an issue without manually inspecting the connection in “Manage In-DB Connections”.  Since I’ve encountered some challenges with In-DB connections before, I suggested using the Dynamic Output In-DB tool, which I’ve used before for the “Input Connection String” option.

What I had never done before, and didn’t realize until I tested this, was use this with a connection that leverages an embedded SQL Server account username/password.  When using this type of connection, an error is thrown that says: “              Dynamic Output In-DB (1)             To use this tool select an appropriate data source and select the "Allow Decryption of Password" Password Encryption option in Manage In-DB Connections.”.  However, the tool still works and appropriately pulls the connection as it exists.

For security reasons, we don’t want decrypted passwords floating around in this information, and we can’t enable “allow decryption of password” in our server environment.

So, my request would be to either add logging to In-Database tools to pass the connection string information (similar to regular input tools), or to add a method for outputting a connection string without a decrypted password that doesn't cause an error in Alteryx.

Screenshots below for reference.

It would be good to expose the column metadata (data types) of HIVE tables when viewed using the "Select In-DB" tool, similar to the standard select tool.

As a consumer of hive table from alteryx via the In-DB tools, it adds value to understand the semantics (atleast the field types to start with) of the hive table from alteryx.

Regards,

Sandeep.

The summarize tool have drag drop facility and cross checking and suggestion on the type of aggregation that can be applied based on the data type.

e.g. Let there be two different stack. One to be used for Group By. Another for aggregation.

We should be able to drag fields to these sections.

Now when we are dragging something to the Aggregation stack, based on the data type, a small suggestion list of possible aggregation to choose from.

And a small validation of the data type to aggregation if we are defining the aggregation manually.

I can provide mock ups if anyone is interested.

Right now there is not an exception join in DB which means if I want to remove records I have to filter on NULL and with large tables this is really inefficient.

We are seeing a trend where database teams are using certificate authentication with process ids instead of passwords.  It would be extremely beneficial if Alteryx supported this type of authentication so that users can utilize the benefits of process ids instead of their individual ids which require password changes every 45 days.  The database team that is currently switching to this type of authentication is the Mainframe DB2 team but it would be great if Alteryx enabled this for all database platforms.

Hi,

i recently started working on Alteryx and would like to ask if its possible to have preview of data when using In database tools working with db tables.

I have to invest more time on seeing the result using browse tools which again slows bit the performance on queries just to see the results.Also each step you have to add browse tool.

I have worked heavily on powerbi and see this as prime need as in PBI you can work on the visible data itself and figure it out right away how the transformations are working.if preview feature with cache options are given i guess that would be a big booster for Alteryx users.

Thanks,

Brij

When connecting to Oracle thru In-db

I've came across an awkward issue, somehow Alteryx can't read TNS that I've defined.

Eventually I've had a solution and this was not as straight forward as it should be...

1) There is an easy way to edit, update add TNS records, finding the file and understand and update it is not as straightforward as a non IT person to tackle

Here's some tablau links on how to do it... http://kb.tableau.com/articles/howto/setting-an-oracle-connection-to-use-tnsnames-ora-or-ldap-ora

2) Especially the In-db tool doesn't even look at that file...

It says enter "TNS Server Name" but it actually asks for an IP address and some credentials like

1.0.0.0.1/oracl,

you gotta write this in Help file,

You gotta have a better UI/UX design that helps the end user...

Best

Hi Support,

Please consider this Idea in your future release of Alteryx based on the following details:

• Once an In-DB Write action is processed, process is only based on internal table (creation of a temporary table within Hive / Warehouse depository, load data inpath…, then rename & move this table at specified location within « Table Name » option).
• Customer requirement is to have this process available on external table along with available options similar to available one within In-Memory tool.
• Proposed work-around from your side is only satisfactory as a temporary solution:
  • write to a table in the write in-db tool;
  • stream out 1 record from that table;
  • write that to a "fake" temporary table in the regular output tool;
  • and then use a post SQL statement to create the external table and move the data from the table created with write in-db to the external table.

Thanks & Regards,

YRA

During my time with Alteryx, I've largely been able to accomplish all of my data processing jobs using the in-database toolset.

One exception is when it comes to window functions/multi-row formulas. When window functionality is needed, an Alteryx approach ends up looking something like this:
- Stream data out of database to an intermediate table

- Run a pre-written window function over dataset

- Store results into another intermediate table

- Load intermediate table into separate Alteryx workflow to continue further processing

While it may be possible to use a self-join as a workaround, it results in a bottlenecked, inefficient process. The same could be said for streaming the dataset out of database to use the non-in-database multi-row formula built in to Alteryx.

If anyone knows of an existing solution, please let me know - otherwise I believe many users would greatly benefit from this added functionality.

Hi,

It would be great if we can get the collection name by using some engine variables in the workflow. By doing so, we can use collections extensively for client specific categorizations. If we create collection for each client and if we are able to get the collection name from which collection this workflow got executed, then we will be able to track the executed workflow is performed against that respective client. This will solve the db connection establishments, i.e. based on the collection name (i.e. client name) we can build the respective client db connection the same workflow.

As my Alteryx workflows are becoming more complex and involve integrating and conforming more and more data sources it is becoming increasingly important to be able to communicate what the output fields mean and how they were created (ie transformation rules) as output for end user consumption; particular the file target state output. 

It would be great if Alteryx could do the following: 

1. Produce a simple data dictionary from the Select tool and the Output tool. The Select tool more or less contains everything that is important to the business user; It would be awesome to know of way to export this along with the actual data produced by the output tool (hopefully this is something I've overlooked and is already offered).

Examples:

• using Excel would be to produce the output data set in one sheet and the data dictionary for all of its attributes in the second sheet.
• For an odbc output you could load the data set to the database and have the option to either create a data dictionary as a database table or csv file (you'd also want to offer the ability to append that data to the existing dictionary file or table. 

2. This one is more complex; but would be awesome. If the workflow used could be exported into a spreadsheet Source to Target (S2T) format along with supporting metadata / data dictionary for every step of the ETL process. This is necessary when I need to communicate my ETL processes to someone that cannot afford to purchase an alteryx licence but are required to review and approved the ETL process that I have built. I'd be happy to provide examples of how someone would likely want to see that formatted. 

Alteryx has proven very useful in connecting to and processing data in local Cloudera HDFS cluster.  However, like most companies we are moving much of our processing/storage to a cloud environment like AWS and Azure.  A typical security setting is to have this data encrypted within HDFS.  Unfortunately Alteryx does not support this environment.  This could quickly force us to look for different platforms to use unless Alteryx can evolve to support this.

MySQL released version 8 for general availability in April 2018. It would be nice when Alteryx installed LUA scripts for MySQL 8 by default. Now only LUA scripts for MySQL 5 are installed.

It seems that I'm unable to use my mouse wheel to scroll through or "Control + A" to select all in the "Table or Query" field of the "Connect In-DB" tool.  I have to click the top of it and drag down the text to highlight it all.

I realize a true "In-DB" version of the SharePoint tool may not be possible due to the complexity and layers to get to an actual SharePoint Database. However, would it be possible to add some parameters for pre-filtering? O365 version of SharePoint has some timeout limitations that cause the SharePoint tool to fail randomly. If I could specify parameters (such as a date minus some number of days or hours on a particular date field) to filter the dataset. Or specify record ID ranges to pull records in batches, this would allow users to work around this issue.

Looking forward for the addition of in-database tools for SybaseIQ or SAP IQ

Please star that idea so Alteryx product management can prioritize this request accordingly...

Note on SAPIQ;

• SAP IQ is a database server optimized for analytics/BI, it is a columnar RDBMS optimized for Big Data analytics
• IQ is very good for ad-hoc queries that would be difficult to optimize in a legacy transactional RDBMS...
• It's ranked number 48th amongst all DBMS and 27th amongst relational DBMS
• SAP IQ16 has gained R language support

currently we can connect with ODBC, http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Sources/sap-sybase-iq-ODBC/m-p/9716/highlight/true#M700

In the in-db join, add the possibility to make left-except or right-except join in addition to the 4 available options.

Please let me know if I've overlooked a suggestion and I'll be glad to upvote that post.  

Just as we're able to right click a input and turn it into a macro imput for example, it would be helpful to turn formula into In-Db formula and the same goes for all the other tools that are available both inside and outside In-Db.

I created several fields inside a formula tool and later on, I had to do the same but In-Db, the field names and rules were the same, if I could I would just turn the one I already had into an In-Db tool.

Thanks.

In the great workaround In-Database Sorting, the author explain how to distribute the sorting in ot the database.

Unfortunately, the Percent option is not available for a Hive Connection (I'm using Simba Hive ODBC driver v2.1 connection).

This is a behavior that my user would like to use in order to reduce the duration of the workflow (so they do not need to stream datas in and out).

We are using Alteryx 10.6 x64.

What do you think about my need ?