Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Our Alteryx users query a number of different data sources.  Some of these include external servers outside our control.

To avoid any issues regarding locking, we use the Read Uncommitted function as part of the Data Input tool as part of our baseline design, probably 95% of the time or more.

It would be very beneficial for our organization if there was a way for us to set this option to be checked by default, so that it was one less thing users needed to remember when configuring a quick data pull.

There is a need when visualizing in-Database workflows to be able to visualize sorted data. This sorting could be done 1 of 2 ways: In a browse tool, or as a stand-alone Sort tool. Either would address the need. Without such a tool being present, the only way to sort the data is to "Data Stream Out" and then visualize the data in Alteryx. However, this process violates the premise of the usefulness of the in-DB toolkit, which is to keep your data in-DB and process using the DB engine. Streaming out big data in order to add a sort is not efficient.

Granted, the in-DB processing doesn't care whether data is sorted or not. However, when attempting to find extreme values after an aggregation, or when trying to identify something as simple as whether null values are present in a field, then a sort becomes extremely useful, and a necessary tool for human consumption of data (regardless of the database's processing needs).

Thanks very much for hearing my idea!

DELETE from Source_Data Where ID in

SELECT ID from My_Temp_Table where FLAG = 'Y'

.... 

Essentially, I want to update a DB table with either an update or with the deletion of rows.  I can't delete all of the data.  My work around will be to create/insert into a table the keys that i want to delete and try to use a input/output tool with SQL that performs the delete.  Any other suggestions are welcome, but a tool is best.

Thanks,

Mark

When moving external data into the database, the underlying SQL looks like:

CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY  TABLE "AYX16020836880b41e08246b59ee8c"

...

My client would like to add a prefix to the table as:

CREATE GLOBAL TEMPORARY  TABLE MMMM999_DM_USER."AYX16020836880b41e08246b59ee8c"

where MMMM999_DM_USER is supplied in the configuration.

A service account  automatically sets the current session to something like MMMM999 (alter session set curent schema=MMMM999;)

If you have a complex SQL query with a number of dynamic substitutions (e.g. Update WHERE Clause, Replace a Specific String), it would be nice to be able to optionally ouput the SQL that is being executed. This would be particuarly useful for debugging.

As a MicroStrategy customer it would be nice if Alteryx would support output for either the .mstr file format or better direct creation and publication of the iCUBE, intelligent cube format on their server solution. This would be similar to the existing features of writing a twbx or  TDE file extract and publish to Tableau server.

Opposite if the Input connector could read from an intelligence cube on the MSTR iServer as datasource that would be great as well.

Below a link to their SOA webservices documentation to pull data into applications, perhaps an option.

Data as a Service

In a fututre release from SQL Server the datatypes text, ntext and image will be deprecated. It is already a bad datatype because you cannot use it as a "normal" character string. No equal to sometinh else in T-SQL on a text datatype.

As far as I know Alteryx defaults to text (my source is a PostgreSQL database) when creating the table in SQL Server. The datatype in Alteryx is Vstring. Instead of text or ntext it would be zo much better to use varchar(MAX) or nvarchar(MAX) when creating the table. Not only for compatiblity and later use in T-SQL (if any), but it is faster as well. Data from a varchar(MAX) column is stored in the same page as the record, as log as it fits.

Hi,

Today I pressed F1 in the Output Tool to find out what the setting Transaction Size does. It turned out that this is not documented.

It would be a great idea to make a documentation that covers the options of a tool.

Regards,

Frank 

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.

Hello all,

It will be great if there is an option to specify sql statement or delete based on condition in write In-DB tool. We have to delete all record even though when we are trying to delete and append only a subset of records. If it allows for "WHERE" statement atleast, it will be very much useful. I have a long post going on about this requirement in http://community.alteryx.com/t5/Data-Preparation-Blending/Is-there-a-way-to-do-a-delete-statement-in... .

Regards,

Jeeva.

Scenario: I open a results window with a link, filepath, value, etc. and I want to copy the text.

If I click inside of that cell and press Ctrl +A, nothing happens.

If I click inside the cell, arrow to the end of the text, and then press Shift + Home; the contents of the cell are highlighted.

Why can't we have all of the Windows shortcuts?  Or am I missing something here?

Can the inputs to app interface tools update other interface tools within the same app?  Right now, I believe the only way to do this is with chained-apps, but I don't wish to go that route again.

Just one example:

Can a Dropdown interface tool update a listbox interface tool with an action?  

Right now, I have two interface tools in an app:

1. Dropdown
2. Listbox.  

For the Listbox tool , it references an external source file for the NAME:VALUE pairs, let's call this file:  Category1.yxdb.

I would like for the resulting dropdown selection to update this external source file to say, Category1.yxdb or Category2.yxdb or Category3.yxdb, etc.

The different .yxdb files here have different name:value pairs within them.

It doesn't seem like this possible at the moment, but please let me know if this is something that's currently supported within Alteryx.

Thanks,

Collin

When converting data types while In-DB, it would be really helpful if I could change the data type with the "Select In-DB" tool in a similar manner to the "Select" tool. Currently, we are having to use the "Formula In-DB" tool in order to create a "Cast" Statement.

Currently the only encoding method supported by Alteryx Avro format is deflate.  Please consider improving this to include google snappy approach.

This codec method is referenced in the Avro documentation for supported codex.

https://avro.apache.org/docs/1.7.6/spec.html#Required+Codecs

It would be great to have an outbound connector on output tools for 2 reasons:

a) if this outbound connector can carry key results of the output process, this can be saved in an audit log.  For example - rowcounts; success/failure.   This kind of capabiltiy (to generate a log, or to be able to check the rowcount of rows committed to a database) is important for any large BI ETL process

b) this woudl also allow the process to continue after the output process and also act as a flow of control.   For example:

- First output the product dimension

- once done - then connect (using the outbound connector) to the next macro which then updates the Sales fact table using this product dimension (foreign key dependancy)

The SQL Editor window could have a better presentation of the SQL code; two issues observed

• First, that it's simply plain text without even a fixed-width font, much less syntax highlighting
• Second, if you type in some manually formatted SQL code (e.g. with line feeds and indentation), then click on the "Visual Query Builder" button, then click back to the "SQL Editor" button, all the formatting is lost as it is converted to one run-on line of code, which is very difficult to read.

I understand that going between the Visual Query Builder and the SQL Editor is bound to have some issues; nonetheless the "idea" is to allow a user friendly display in the SQL Editor window:

• Use a fixed width font, (should be trivial to implement)
• SQL formatter, implementation ideas can be found here: https://github.com/TaoK/PoorMansTSqlFormatter
• SQL syntax highlighting, implementation ideas can be found here: https://github.com/jdorn/sql-formatter

My "implementation ideas" are based on a couple minutes with google, so hopefully this is a very feasible request; my user base is very likely to spend more time in the SQL editor than not, so this would be a valuable UX addition.  Thanks!

The option to "Allow Shared Write Access" is only available under CSV and HDFS CSV in the Data Input tool. It would be very helpful to have this feature also included for Excel files.

There is a lot of usage of calendar events in business world. Having a native sync and input functions for popular calendar formats like ical or google calendars will save a lot of time

Improve HIVE connector and make writable data available

Regards,

Cristian.

Hive