Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Data profiling feature in the Browse tool is a great feature, however, when your working with an extremely large data set, it can a large amount of time to fully render.

My idea is if Alteryx can make a pre-determination whether the data is so large that it'll take a substantial amount of time to profile the data. If it does, to not profile immediately, rather, display a message where the profile info would be letting the user know that it may take a while to generate with a "Generate Profile" button if the user needs to see it.

Another option would be to only profile a sample of the data and present the user an option to profile everything.

Thanks,

Jimmy

I was with my friends at Limited Brands yesterday and they pointed out to me a way to improve Alteryx.  While designing a workflow, each time you add an input tool to the canvas you literally have to start from scratch to add additional tables from either a db datasource or file source (e.g. access).  With other tools, you can drag multiple tables to the canvas at once and come back later and add more inputs without having to select your source, see a list of tables etcetera.

On their behalf (they may post another suggestion), I am posting this idea.

Thanks,

Mark

The idea is specific for streaming analytics;

Alteryx seems it can be scheduled frequently to see if there is an update to a file in question.

It would be awesome to enable a listener which will be auto triggered when;

• ay new line is added to a data set (probably a log file) or
• an update to an existing row in a database (then the relevant score will be recalculated for ex.)

It will be straight forward to provide reactive responses to a log file and voila!

Alteryx automation and alteryx server will become a "complex event processor"...

complex event processing with Alteryx?

Here is a link to wiki page for CEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_event_processing

@GeorgeM would you think this will put Alteryx to another gartner MQ* as well?

*https://www.gartner.com/doc/3165532/add-event-stream-processing-business

"Enable Performance Profiling" a great feature for investigating which tools within the workflow are taking up most of the time.This is ok to use during the development time.

It would be ideal to have this feature extended for the following use cases as well:

• Workflows scheduled via the scheduler on the server
• Macros & apps performance profiling when executed from both workstation as well as the scheduler/gallery

Regards,

Sandeep.

It would be great if you could link a comment box to an object.  This would be great because if the objects moves for what ever reason the comment would stay with it.   

When a tool container is disabled, I'd like the lines that are going into it to be different from "enabled" lines. 

They could be grey or dotted for example.

When working on a workflow and disabling containers, I find that the lines entering disabled containers become confusing or cluttering. It would be much simpler to focus my attention efficiently if lines that remain enabled could be distinguished quickly.

Designer should support statistical testing tools that ignore data distribution and support Statistical Learning methods.

Alteryx already supports resampling for predictive modeling with Cross-Validation.

Resampling tools for bootstrap and permutation tests (supporting with or without replacement) should be tools for analysts and data scientists alike that assess random variability in a statistic without needing to worry about the restrictions of the data's distribution, as is the case with many parametric tests, most commonly supported by the t-test Tool in Alteryx. With modern computing power the need for hundred-year-old statistical sampling testing is fading: the power to sample a data set thousands of times to compare results to random chance is much easier today.

The tool's results could include, like R, outputs of not only the results histogram but the associated Q-Q plot that visualizes the distribution of the data for the analyst. This would duplicate the Distribution Analysis tool somewhat, but the Q-Q plot is, to me, a major missing element in the simplest visualization of data. This tool could be very valuable in terms of feeding the A/B Test tools.

As a security enhancement, the default passwords setting should be encrypt for user. Although this is critical for security my users have overlooked this even with training. They truly aren't culpable if they forgot. If it is the default then they must consciously change the it to an insecure setting.

From a security perspective the current default setting is backwards.

Grant Hansen

Hi All,

With Integration of various platform in Alteryx, connector seems to be an ease of use.

One is, yammer connectors. It would-

1. Help to extract insights of organisation pages.

2. Understand the productivity/Ideas of an organisation overall and help in enterprise content management.

Currently, the process to extract such data is through REST API/Bulk API and a connector would solve the issues.

Thanks

Harsh

Greenplum / Postgresql Bulk Loader Capability much like the oracle and MS Sql.

Thanks!
John

Under the new licensing system (licenses.alteryx.com), I don't have the ability to truly release a license seat without user interaction. Currently, I have to revoke the license and then have that user start up alteryx on their machine to complete the process. Until the user starts up alteryx, I cannot reallocate that license. 

I would like the ability to obsolete a license where as soon as I click the button in the licensing portal, I can immediately reallocate that license to somebody else. This functionality existed in the previous licensing system and is not available in the new licensing system.

I have a problem when transferring records between different O365 Sharepoint Sites.  It seems that Alteryx cannot maintain 2 separate connections at the same time.  I can transfer fine if I read from one site to a temp file and then, in another workflow, read from the file and write to the second site.

I can work around the problem using Block until Done, but there are some situations where I need to be able to compare between lists in 2 different sites and write back to one or both depending on the results.  it would be much more convenient to be have multiple connections open simultaneously.  I'm aware that Alteryx uses the SharePoint API to move information around.  This API does allow multiple connections.  I'm not familiar with the internals of how Alteryx accesses the API, perhaps the OAuth token is shared through out the workflow process,  but this should be posssible

Thanks for considering this

Dan

Geohash is a latitude/longitude geocode system (public domain). It is a hierarchical spatial data structure which subdivides space into buckets of grid shape.

Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision).

As a consequence of the gradual precision degradation, nearby places will often (but not always) present similar prefixes. The longer a shared prefix is, the closer the two places are.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

https://github.com/sharonjl/geohash-net

https://github.com/simplegeo/libgeohash/blob/master/geohash.c

A lot of popular machine learning systems use a computer's GPU to speed up some of the math to a huge degree. The header on this article on Medium shows a 15x difference from a high-end CPU vs a high-end GPU. It could also create an improvement in the spatial tools. Perhaps Alteryx should add this functionality in order to speed up these tools, which I can imagine are currently some of the slowest.

When I add a data connection to my canvas - it's only added to the Data Connections window under certain circumstances (e.g. when I use an alias, or the SQL connection wizard) rather than showing ALL data connections.

Given the importance of data connections for Alteryx flows - it would be better if ALL data connections were grouped together under a Data Connection Manager, which was as visible as the results window not buried deep in the menu system - and you could also then use this spot to change; share; alias etc.

In Microsoft SSIS there's a useful example of how this could be done - where the connections are very visibly a collection of assets that can be seen and updated centrally in one place.    So if you have 5 input tools which ALL point to the same database - you only need to update the connection on your designer in one place - irrespective of whether this is a shared connection or not.

One of the biggest areas of time spent is in basic data cleaning for raw data - this can be dramatically simplified by taking a hint from the large ETL / Master data Management vendors and making this core Alteryx.

Server Side

- Allow the users of the server & connect product to define their own Business Types (what Microsoft DQS calls "Domains")

       - Example may be a currency code - there are many different synonyms, but in essence you want your data all cleaned back to one master list

- Then allow for different attributes to be added to these business types

       - Currency code would have 2 or 3 additional columns: Currency name; Symbol; Country of issue

- Similar to Microsoft DQS - allow users to specify synonyms and cleanup rules.    For example - Rupes should be Rupees and should be translated to INR

- You also need cross business type rules - if the country is AUS then $ translates to AUD not to USD.

- These rules are maintained by the Data Steward responsibility for this Business Type.

- This master data needs to be stored and queryable as a slowly changing dimension (preferrably split into a latest & history table with the same ID per entry; and timestamps and user audit details for changes)

Alteryx Designer:

- When you get a raw data set - user can then tag some fields as being one of these business types

      - Example: I have a field bal_cur (Balance Currency) - I tag this as Business Type "Currency"

- Then Alteryx automatically checks the data; and applies my cleanup rules which were defined on the server

- For any invalid entries - it marks these as an error in the canvas; and also adds them to a workflow for the data steward for this Business Type on the server -  value is set to an "unmapped" value.    (ID=-1; all text columns set to "unmapped")

- For any valid entries - it gives you the option to add which normalised (conformed) columns you want - currency code; description; ID; symbol; country of issue

Data Steward Workflow:

- The data steward is notified that there is an invalid value to be checked

- They can either mark this as a valid value (in which case this will be added to the knowledge base for this business type) or a synonym of some other valid value; or an invalid value

Cleanup Audit & Logs:

- In order to drive upstream data cleaning over time - we would need to be able to query and report on data cleanups done by source; by canvas; by user; by business type; and by date - to report back to the source system so that upstream data errors can be fixed at source.

Many thanks

Sean

As of today, we cannot choose the field separator when we read a csv file. In France, the common separator for csv is the semi-colon (;)

It leads to this kind of thing in a filter :