Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Would be nice to have the regex tool allow you to drop original input field and report and error if any records fail to parse.

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.

I've been using Events a fair bit recently to run batches through cmd.exe and to call Alteryx modules.

Unfortunately, the default is that the events are named by when the action occurs and what is entered in the Command line.

When you've got multiple events, this can become a problem -- see below:

Events tab with all events called the same thing

It would be great if there was the ability to assign custom names to each event.

It looks like I should be able do this by directly editing the YXMD -- there's a <Description> tag for each event -- but it doesn't seem to work.

It would be useful to have a function or a tool to convert a number into a currency like excel.  Where it would add the $ before and you could choose to have commas and a period for cents.  

ex:  

Input:  15978423.89

output:  $15,978,423.89

of course, i'm sure there would be a need for other currency values besides the '$'.  

415978423.89

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

The are a lot of SQL engines on top of Hadoop like:

• Apache Drill / https://drill.apache.org/
  Schema-free, low latency SQL Query Engine for Hadoop, NoSQL and Cloud Storage
  It's backed up at enterprise level by MapR
• Apache Kylin / http://kylin.apache.org/
  Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop supporting extremely large datasets, original contributed from eBay Inc.
• Apache Flink / https://flink.apache.org/
  Apache Flink is an open source platform for distributed stream and batch data processing. Flink’s core is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations over data streams. The creators of Flink provide professional services trought their company Data Artisans.
• Facebook Presto / https://prestodb.io/
  Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes.
  It's backed up at enterprise level by Teradata - http://www.teradata.com/PRESTO/

My suggestion for Alteryx product managers is to build a tactical approach for these engines in 2016.

Regards,

Cristian.

Improve HIVE connector and make writable data available

Regards,

Cristian.

Hive

Please add Parquet data format (https://parquet.apache.org/) as read-write option for Alteryx.

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format available to any project in the Hadoop ecosystem, regardless of the choice of data processing framework, data model or programming language.

Thank you.

Regards,

Cristian.

I have many aggregation in the same workflow which product one or two different column each, total could be xx different columns. Wouldn't it be nice to have a multiple append tool that could take connections from many other tools? At the moment I would have to use many separate append fields tools and then one transpose, or multiple transposes and union. Either way you have to attach something to each tool. 

Functions such as Year([Date Field]), Month([Date Field]), and Day([Date Field]) would really help with date-based formulas and filter tests.

It would be helpful to have the Read Uncommitted listed as a global runtime setting.

Most of the workflows I design need this set, so rather than risk forgetting to click this option on one of my inputs it would be beneficial as a global setting.

For example: the user would be able to set specific inputs according to their need and the check box on the global runtime setting would remain unchecked.

However, if the user checked the box on the global runtime setting for Read Uncommitted then all of the workflow would automatically use an uncommtted read on all of the inputs.

When the user unchecks the global runtime setting for Read Uncommitted, then only the inputs that were set up with this option will remain set up with the read uncommitted.

Although we can write a temporary file with all the parameters used it would be very helpful to pass simple parameters (or go all the way) between the Apps. I imagine any parameter created using Interface Tools should be available throughout the whole Chained App. 

There is "update:insert if new" option for the output data tool if using an ODBC connection to write to Redshift.

This option really needs to be added to the "amazon redshift bulk loader" method of the output data tool, and the write in db tool.

Without it means you are forced to use the "Delete and append" output which is a pain because then you need to keep reinserting data that you already have, slowing down the process.

Using the ODBC connection option of the output data tool to write to Redshift is not an option as it is too slow. Trying to write 200MB of data, the workflow runs for 20 minutes without any data reaching the destination table. End up just stopping the workflow.

It would be good to have the ability to select what column to use for Primary key when using the "create new table" output option of the output data tool.

When using the "update: insert if new" output option, you receive the error "Primary Key required for Update" if table does not have primary key.

Workaround is to manually create table with primary key constraint.

Please evaluate the option to add 2 new containers:

1. parallel - execute tasks inside in parallel
2. serial - execute tasks in strict  order, imposed at design time. In the future the oder of operations could be enforced by parameters or other input conditions at runtime.

Please Give us the capacity to mix and match these 2 containers.

Thank you

Regards,
Cristian.

I would like to suggest to contemplate the option to add a new SDK based on lua language.

Why Lua?

o is open source / MIT license

o is portable

o is fast

o is powerful and simple

o Lua has been used to extend programs written in C, C++, Java, C#, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, Erlang

My client today asked if Alteryx could be configured to build/run horizontally from right to left.  Thought I'd post the idea. 

Currently the Save Field Configuration, when used with fields in a different order does not give any indication that the ordering will not be saved and reused. It is possible people may use this option without realising.

This should be in the help at a minimum, perhaps in a warning box when used too, but ideally the renames and types should be applied to the columns they came from by Name - not just based on the order of the fields.