Back in the days of Visual Basic 6, and Delphi 3 - the development environment for software coding started introducing the idea of Optimization hints - specifically looking at things like variables you'd declared but never used.
All of the Alteryx tips guides say "as early as possible use a Select tool to remove fields that are not used in the workflow" - it would be very useful if the Alteryx system did a reverse walk through the workflow (from outputs back to inputs) and suggested fields that were not used anywhere or components that could / should be removed because they don't go anywhere.
For example
- Unused Components: if I have a filter with a summarize on both legs, and only one leg goes to an output - then the summarize on the other leg is just a waste of processor and memory.
- Unused Fields: If I've been lazy and brought in all the fields in a spreadsheet and only used two of them through a complex and heavy workflow - then suggest that I only bring in 2; or that I add a select component for those two fields early on
- Ineffective data types:
- Numbers stored in a double that could be stored in an int16;
- numbers stored in strings;
- strings stored in very large containers which only need 10 characters;
- dates stored in strings
- Using a field for "True" and "False" instead of the Boolean True and False (1 and 0)
By adding a reverse-walk to a workflow (sort of like an A-B-Tree prune on a game-tree) - Alteryx could spot many of these kinds of issues - and by observing the workflow in action over a few iterations, it could identify the remainder.
