Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

I notice that at least my Output files are tied up "being used by another program" after the workflow is closed.  I have to actually close out of Alteryx to release the file.  The file s/b released as soon as the workflow using it is done running.  Failing that, as soon as the workflow is closed vs having to close Alteryx completely.

...or is this just my issue?

Right now as far as I know you need to add each DB connection manually. This works... but is quite time consuming when trying to run tasks against a cluster of prod databases. It would be awesome to pass a JSON config file,example below, to the Alteryx Engine and have Alteryx create those connections upon parsing the file. This would save tons of time, and allow teams to share a central config file with consistent aliases across their clusters to ensure their app connections point to the same DBs across workflows. It would also make on boarding a breeze for new developers on team.

Sometimes, when I am working with new data sources, it would be nice to have a dockable pane that would allow me to view the schema of all of my connected data sources. That way I could rename fields and change data types as needed without having to jump from one select tool to the other to see how the schemas compare.

My organization requires users to change their active directory passwords every so often. That's fine. That does create an issue with changing passwords on all workflows that contain a tableau server publish, but that's not the real issue here.

What's more annoying is that once that password is changed, the data source name and project is lost. When updating multiple data sources across workflows (or within the same workflow) this becomes quite cumbersome and annoying. 

I know there are limitations on the partner side as this is technically a tableau controlled thing, but is there anything that can be done here?

Hello All,

I received from an AWS adviser the following message:

_____________________________________________

Skip Compression Analysis During COPY
Checks for COPY operations delayed by automatic compression analysis.

Rebuilding uncompressed tables with column encoding would improve the performance of 2,781 recent COPY operations.
This analysis checks for COPY operations delayed by automatic compression analysis. COPY performs a compression analysis phase when loading to empty tables without column compression encodings. You can optimize your table definitions to permanently skip this phase without any negative impacts.

Observation

Between 2018-10-29 00:00:00 UTC and 2018-11-01 23:33:23 UTC, COPY automatically triggered compression analysis an average of 698 times per day. This impacted 44.7% of all COPY operations during that period, causing an average daily overhead of 2.1 hours. In the worst case, this delayed one COPY by as much as 27.5 minutes.

Recommendation

Implement either of the following two options to improve COPY responsiveness by skipping the compression analysis phase:
Use the column ENCODE parameter when creating any tables that will be loaded using COPY.
Disable compression altogether by supplying the COMPUPDATE OFF parameter in the COPY command.
The optimal solution is to use column encoding during table creation since it also maintains the benefit of storing compressed data on disk. Execute the following SQL command as a superuser in order to identify the recent COPY operations that triggered automatic compression analysis:
WITH xids AS (
SELECT xid FROM stl_query WHERE userid>1 AND aborted=0
AND querytxt = 'analyze compression phase 1' GROUP BY xid)
SELECT query, starttime, complyze_sec, copy_sec, copy_sql
FROM (SELECT query, xid, DATE_TRUNC('s',starttime) starttime,
SUBSTRING(querytxt,1,60) copy_sql,
ROUND(DATEDIFF(ms,starttime,endtime)::numeric / 1000.0, 2) copy_sec
FROM stl_query q JOIN xids USING (xid)
WHERE querytxt NOT LIKE 'COPY ANALYZE %'
AND (querytxt ILIKE 'copy %from%' OR querytxt ILIKE '% copy %from%')) a
LEFT JOIN (SELECT xid,
ROUND(SUM(DATEDIFF(ms,starttime,endtime))::NUMERIC / 1000.0,2) complyze_sec
FROM stl_query q JOIN xids USING (xid)
WHERE (querytxt LIKE 'COPY ANALYZE %'
OR querytxt LIKE 'analyze compression phase %') GROUP BY xid ) b USING (xid)
WHERE complyze_sec IS NOT NULL ORDER BY copy_sql, starttime;

Estimate the expected lifetime size of the table being loaded for each of the COPY commands identified by the SQL command. If you are confident that the table will remain under 10,000 rows, disable compression altogether with the COMPUPDATE OFF parameter. Otherwise, create the table with explicit compression prior to loading with COPY.

_____________________________________________

When I run the suggested query to check the COPY commands executed I realized all belonged to the Redshift bulk output from Alteryx.

Is there any way to implement this “Skip Compression Analysis During COPY” in alteryx to maximize performance as suggested by AWS?

Thank you in advance,

Gabriel

There should be a macro which could be used as read input macro for in-db tools.

Similarly, there should be a write macro for in-db tools.

Good afternoon,

I work with a large group of individuals, close to 30,000, and a lot of our files are ran as .dif/.kat files used to import to certain applications and softwares that pertain to our work. We were wondering if this has been brought up before and what the possibility might be.

Yeah, so when you have 15 workflows for some folks and you've actually decided to publish to a test database first, and now you have to publish to a production database it is a *total hassle*, especially if you are using custom field mappings.  Basically you have to go remap N times where N == your number of new outputs.  

Maybe there is a safety / sanity check reason for this, but man, it would be so nice to be able to copy an output, change the alias to a new destination, and just have things sing along.  BRB - gotta go change 15 workflow destination mappings. 

There should be an option to not update values with Null-values in the database, when using the tool Output Data, with the options:

• File Format = ODBC Database (odbc:)
• Output Options = Update;Insert if new

This apply to MS SQL Server Databases for my part, but might affect other destinations as well?

When outputting files, it is usually beneficial for characters that would cause trouble with formatting/syntax to be properly escaped. However, there are situations where suppressing this behavior is desirable.

Of particular importance for such a feature is in the outputting of JSON files. Currently, if a file is output as JSON it will always have quotations escaped if they occur within a field, regardless of whether this conforms to the JSON standard. There are a variety of current workaround for this, including pre-formatting all fields to look like JSON and then outputting as a \0 delimiter CSV, but in many cases there is no need to escape any characters when outputting a JSON.

A simple toggle--as was created for suppressing BOM in CSVs--to disable character escaping would make the creation of JSON objects simpler and reduce the amount of workarounds required to output proper JSON.

Please add a tool to edit different cells in table randomly and update the source after editing. Similar to the "Edit Top 200 rows in SQL". That would be very much helpful

On the output data component, when outputting to a database, there are Pre & Post Create SQL statement switches.  This allows for the execution of a SQL statement in the DB but only after a create table action.  To use this functionality you must have populated a table using the 'create new table' or 'overwrite' option, which is no good if you're using the Update or Append options.  Change these switches to Pre & Post SQL Statements as per the Input Data component.  This will allow you to execute SQL statements in the DB either before or after the population action.  Can be really handy if you need to execute database stored procedures for example.  

Please note:  You can already work around this by branching from your data stream and creating or overwriting a dummy table, then use the pre or post create switch for your SQL statement.  This is a bit messy and can leave dummy tables in the DB, which is a bit scruffy.

Add extra capabilities int he Output Tool so that the following can be accomplished without the need for using Post SQL processing:

- Create a new SQL View

- Assign a Unique Index key to a table

Having these capabilities directly available in the tools would greatly increase the usability and reduce the workload required to build routines and databases.

At the moment the salesforce connector does not support view objects like AccountUserTerritory2View. It should be extended to support those objects to facilitate more efficient and above all complete data extraction. 

Hi,

I am sure that I can't be the only person that would be interested in an output tool that allows categorical fields on both axes.  THis would allow you to visualise the following example and I would suggest that this was either similar to the heatmap with boxes or the colour / size of the entry was determined by a third numerical value - such as 'Confidence' from the table below.  THere might be ways to extend the idea as well as having a fourth parameter that puts text in the box or another number but it would be useful and not too hard I am sure.

Many thanks in advance for considering this,

Peter

I run into this a bunch.  There are some Alteryx workarounds for some use cases but not all.

Hi,

Is there an easy way through Alteryx to rename a file once I have processed it... Would like file name to be- FileName.csv.Date.Time (FileName.txt.20180424.055230)

Thanks.

I have encountered problem with Oracle Direct Connection tool. I have the correct host, port, service name, user name and password (the same configuration works with Toad), but Alteryx still complaints the service name is not found on tnsnames.ora (ORA-12154). Well, the reason to use Direct Connection is that I do not have admin rights on my computer to edit the file, so it seems this kind of problem can only be resolved by reaching out to our IT service to edit tnsnames.ora for me.

I would like to able to limit the data being read from the source based on the volume , such as 10GB or 5 GB etc. This will help in case of POC's where we can process portion of the dataset and not the entire dataset. This will have many different used cases as well.