Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Idea:

I know cache-related ideas have already been posted (cache macros; cache tools), but I would like it if cache were simply built into every tool, similar to the way it is on the Input Tool.

Reasoning:

During workflow development, I'll run the workflow repeatedly, and especially if there is sizeable data or an R tool involved, it can get really time consuming.

Implementation ideas:

I can see where managing cache could be tricky: in a large workflow processing a lot of data, nobody would want to maintain dozens of copies of that data.  But there may be ways of just monitoring changes to the workflow in order to know if something needs to be rebuilt or not: e.g. suppose I cache a Predictive Tool, and then make no changes to any tool preceeding it in the workflow... the next time I run, the engine should be able to look at "cache flags" and/or "modified tool flags" to determine where it should start: basically start at the "furthest along cache" that has no "modified tools" preceeding it.

Anyway, just a thought.

I've seen several posts and questions concerning NULL dates.  Is 09/31/2010 a valid date?  I know that 02/29/206 isn't valid and that 02/00/2006 isn't either, but I really don't like finding out about these in conversion warning messages.

I might suggest a function that returns True or False on the date check and let the user configure appropriate rules to rethink the attempted date prior to committing the field to the date data type.

Cheers,

Mark

Could you please assess the idea of reverse engineering existing SQL code (in special inside DataWarehouse's code, thousands of LOCs filled with SELECT and JOINS) and replace it with Alteryx widgets?

Doing this will accelerate penetration rate of Alteryx products in large companies and dismantle IBM Cognos and their cousins.

I think the scheduler should include another frequency otpion of every other week.  Let's say I want a workflow to run every other Monday, there is currently no simple way to do this.  There are some workarounds but they are not ideal and include some additional manual work which defeats the purpose of having the scheduler. 

For example I have an ERROR MESSAGE tool that is rather verbose.  I chose to modify the annotation as:  ZIP Code Check.  I presumed that the result would simply be "ZIP Code Check", but Alteryx added that to the beginning of the annotation rather than replacing the whole annotation.  I reported this as a bug, but was told that this was designed to operate in this manner.  It was suggested that I bring this out as a "New Idea" to the community for review.  If you agree that the tools should operate in a similar fashion for annotation (or other actions) across the pallet, please STAR this.  Otherwise, I'm happy to hear your feedback.

Thanks,

Mark

For the purposes of troubleshooting/optimization, it might come in handy to have a timestamp column in the Results Pane. Especially with processes time-consuming enough that I let them run in the background, I would like to know which steps are particularly time consuming, and seeing when the messages were generated would at least be a start.

Add a search or find function that looks for content within a tool rather than just the tool number. e.g. ctrl Find, to look for any tool that uses a keyword or field in the formula/join/etc. This would save me a boatload of time editing, updating, and troubleshooting my workflows.

I've had the need to Find & Replace inside of a formula that I've written.  Would it be possible to have that type of functionality inside of the expression builder?

Does anyone else think that it would be useful?

Would be nice to select a bunch of consecutive fields, and cut them and paste them to a different area.  Currently, the only options are to Move to Top or Move to Bottom.  If you want to move somewhere in between, you have to scroll through the whole list.

Hi,

Can we have a functionality to see total number of rows without adding a browse or any other tool?

PFA (output from Alteryx 10.0)

Thanks,

Rajesh Chandak

Data Analyst - Walmart

Instead of adding a tool container to the canvas, then moving my input tool into that - it would be nice if I could just click a box for 'Disable' in the input tool properties.  This would speed up things if I'm trying to test inputs one at a time; or need to disable just one specific output while I test another data stream in my workflow.

It would be helpful to have one of the following methods to disable output modules to prevent overwriting output files each time a workflow is run:

- A global 'Disable All Output Modules' option, which would effectively mute the workflow without removing any connections

- A module-specific 'disable/enable this module' option, to the same end

I constantly find my using pre and post SQL Commands in the Output tool to run SQL when I don't actually have any data to output.

One example is when I load data into S3 and want to load it into Redshift. I have SQL code to run but no data to Output - I end up running a dummy row into a temp table.

So can we have an SQL tool that simply acts the same as a Pre-SQL command without the associated data output. Once the command is run we should be able to continue the workflow, so the tool should have an option input and output, like the Run Command tool.

When a workflow has run it has it's final message.

 Alteryx Product Ideas

It would be great to have a datetime stamp included in the file message. When running multiple jobs and editing multiple workflows it would be great to be able to check the last runtime so you know when each job had finished. As I often flip between multiple workflows during development and can working on up to 10 or more at any one time 

Tools within a workflow needs to be able to run in parallel whereever applicable.

For example: Extracting 10 million rows from one source, 12 million rows from a different source to perform blending.

currently the order of execution is the order in which tools are dragged into the canvas. Hence Source1 first, Source2 second and then the JOIN.

Here Source1 & Source2 are completely independent, hence can be run in parallel. Thus saving the workflow execution time.

Execution time is quite crucial when you have tight data loading window.

Hopefully alteryx considers this in the next release!

Idea:

A tool for encryption/decription of a column with multiple encrypiton options is the idea.

Both one way and two way encription should be possible.

Rationale:

Clients are in need of encrypting customers' personal identification data

before sharing it with a third party like consultants and analytics service providers etc.

When insights are provided back the data owner needs to quickly decrypt the ID field and get results or decide actions.

Clients:

This is especially an important case for banks, non bank financial institutions and telecom companies in EU countries and similar (Turkey has similar strict rules)

Best

Idea:

Let's add the universal PMML predictive markup language to rapidly deploy our predictive models. 

Rationale:

Most of the predictive models created are essentially built to be deployed into well known enterprise level decisioning tools.

These decisioning tools are working at banks, non bank financial institutions, credit card issuers, insurers on a daily basis.

If Alteryx want's to replace SAS, SPSS and similar competitor this PMML addition seems to be a must.

They all have a common markup language and even with the newer version we can deploy almost all data pre-processing steps too...

Current status in Alteryx as I'm aware of:

Only case where Alteryx and PMML comes close is the following link; http://www.alteryx.com/topic/pmml promising including PMML in the upcoming releases in 2012. And then no word of it. The writer is retired already and no word since 2012 (3 yrs is a long time span). 

What to do:

On easy way is already done for R, this is a Java library for converting R models to PMML https://github.com/jpmml/jpmml-converter

Clients:

FICO is one of the well known credit bureaus worldwide and also the vendor of decisioning software. They also have an Analytics Modeler Suite. All FICO systems are PMML compliant. Chek it out: http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/2014/10/17/first-look-fico-analytic-modeler-suite-jtonedm...

Also Experian is one of the other big software vendors in the Analytics space with decision management tools and they are actually a partner of Alteryx too... Their well known widely implemented Powercurve tool has PMML language import too... Check it out: http://jtonedm.com/2014/05/13/first-look-experian-powercurve-update/

IBM ODM is a nother vendor for decisioning tools in the enterprise level. They also have PMML integration, look; http://www.prolifics.com/blog/odm-integration-spss-predictive-analysis-suite-part-1-pmml-import

Competitor status:

SAS supports PMML export from SAS Enterprise Miner

IBM SPSS products (Modeler and Statistics) offer a great deal of support for PMML

KNIME is one of the leaders in processing PMML documents 

RapidMiner has a PMML extension

MicroStrategy strongly supports the standard