I haven’t found a common spatial file format to use between Alteryx, MapInfo Pro and ArcMap. The one file/db type that all 3 software packages have the ability to use is SQLite. Problem is that each of these GIS packages stores data differently in SQLite.
I propose the following… Alteryx should have 2 new SQLite options to save output (and read from) in SQLite-ESRI and SQLite-MapInfo. This does not get us to the holy grail of one common file format but does get us down to 2. (If you guys could figure out 1 common format that would be better)
Having these new SQLite formats would fix a common issue shared by the Alteryx supported ESRI and MapInfo formats, namely 2G file limits, multiple files per dataset and short field names. Currently, to save an output for ESRI and Mapinfo, I take a single yxdb and save multiple shape or tab files. The conversion back is an aggregation of individual files into an yxdb. SQLite, as a database, has the ability to store many tables which further reduces files (much like a file geodatabase).
Finally, I have been begging for Alteryx to have the ability to read and write to an ESRI file geodatabase, which seems to never come to fruition. This SQLite solution would eliminate my need to write out to file geodatabases.
