Driver Packs for Alteryx

[SeanAdams]

One of the most common causes for Admin trauma for our central Alteryx Gallery team - is dealing with drivers that may not be on the server; or a particular worker; or on a designer.

What we're looking for, is for the Alteryx team to maintain a packaged set of drivers as a single installer - which we can download at the same location as the Alteryx designer / server versions.

This would allow us to have 1 version of all drivers across ALL designer clients; as well as on our workers and servers.

CC: @rijuthav @jithinmony @HengHe @RajK @ydmuley @revathi @Deeksha @MPistone @Ari_Fuller @Arianna_Fuller @JoshKushner @samnelson @avinashbonu @Sunder_Sriram @Rahul_Thakur @Rahul_Singh

[Deeksha]

@SeanAdams   Wish i could   add  multiple stars in my   support of this!

Very critical  for us as the Alteryx  platform management team for our firm , we  spend hours together   with multiple  technology teams to  have the latest versions across drivers  made  available to us ( we  have strong controls  that   need to be passed for the external softwares/plugins before used in our firm's environment, followed by packaging by dedicated tech. teams).

After  we are able to make the drivers available, the deployment across our scaled out Alteryx  Infrastructure  (multiple workers and environments - Dev. ,Prod., BCP) is very time consuming.

The   common driver package would   not only reduce the cycle time but also help the Alteryx users  be on the latest versions   with just a single downloadable   package.

@revathi@avinashbonu

[revathi]

Thanks @SeanAdams for adding this idea in the community. 

Without the latest driver package in place, server environment ends up with multiple versions of the same driver and it is a cumbersome process to maintain all the different versions with the DSNs required for every single team. 

Tableau provides their desktop application packaged with the prerequisites (visual C++) and the major commonly used drivers (SQL, Postgres, Amazon Redshift etc.) If Alteryx could add these components (latest version at the time of the version release), we could ensure that we maintain one version of the driver and cascade the same to rest of the firm as well. 

[jithinmony]

+1 The ability to package drivers into a single installer which can then be deployed accross all nodes will be extremely helpful!

[adrianloong]

+1, particularly in larger corporates where so many IT people have to get involved to package up any product.

[AlexP]

Thanks for the feedback, all.

We're exploring adding some of our most used drivers to the Alteryx Designer/Server install. The idea itself is for a separate install that only contains drivers. Is there a reason or preference for a separate installer instead of just including drivers with the main product installer?

[SeanAdams]

Hey @AlexP

we'd be OK with the most common drivers being bundled in the main installer if separating them out makes this a challenge - only thinking about separating them is that the cadence of new drivers being released may be mismatched with the cadence for Alteryx version releases.

Based on this difference in cadence, we thought it may be easier to create a separate installer which could be updated more frequently as drivers are updated by the industry, and as Alteryx tests the new driver packs against the latest released version.