Alteryx Designer Desktop Ideas

Teradata has a feature called query banding where a group of queries or more commonly a database session can have additional metadata tagged onto all of the individual queries. The Teradata workload management engine can use information provided in the query band for use in prioritizing query execution and resource allocation.

With normal input tools, the query band information can be populated in the "Pre-SQL" with a query such as:

SET QUERY_BAND = 'org=Finance;report=Fin123;' FOR SESSION;

However, with the In-DB tools, there is no concept of pre-SQL, and no great way to set the query band for the In-DB queries Alteryx submits. We would want to set the query band at the workflow level for performance prioritization and resource allocation monitoring purposes. 

Best regards,
Ryan

During the design phase, we make some experimentations and create tables with Alteryx.

But, sometimes, after this phase or after a mistake, we need to drop those tables.

We know that it's possible to write a drop table statement in Pre-SQL or Post-SQL but it requires SQL skills and it could be done only if you write in a table.

It will be great if we could drop a table directly in the Query builder of the Input tool by making a right click on the table in the discovery tree.

Extension : It also be great to have the same thing in the HDFS browse.

My users need the same functionnality In-db as the in-memory tool "Field Summary".

The purpose is to discover the data : distribution, minimum, maximum, count,valid, unique, ...

In the in-db join, add the possibility to make left-except or right-except join in addition to the 4 available options.

A function to generate relevant Random Mockup data to replace existing data or create new test data sets.

Insert into fields mock data for First Name, Family Name, Email Address, Country, Regular Address, Payment amount and information, etc.

This would be easy to code and could be used to easily replace existing fields with made up fields or jumbled up fields or numbers e.g. payment amounts randomised to a similar size and shape.  There are a number of internet sites that already provide this service but it would be so much better to bake this directly into a tool that allows you to generate random datasets for testing and anonymisation of existing data for demos etc.

This would make users of Alteryx much more productive and allow them to preempt datasets and allow much more rapid creation of solutions.

Hi All,

While using the Join tool, I have ran across the following which I believe if included as part of Alteryx vanilla Join Tool version would be helpful -

1) Joining two data sets on Null values should be optional or should be removed. Generally Null means the value is not known so it seems like a logical error to treat two unknown values as same, unless specified otherwise.

2) Compress whitespaces, I have come across data sets coming from two entites which are all same except for the whitespace. So I think it would help to have an option wherein multiple whitespaces are compressed into one.

3) Case sensitivity/insensitivity - This is quite common for users to convert into upper case or lower case the columns on which Join condition are based. But IT developers end up coding more and at times creating new fields just for joining purpose.

4) Null matches non null - At times the requirement is such that if the join succeeds on a particular key column, null and not null values should be considered a match (but not two non equal non null values).

5) Removal of junk characters - There should be some functionality to remove junk characters from the columns on which joins are performed.

All/Any of the above points can be made available as an additional option in conjunction with the settings available today.

Thanks,

Rohit Bajaj

Hi All,

It would be a given wherein IT would have invested effort and time building workflows and other components using some of the tools which became deprecated with the latest versions.

It is good to have the deprecated versions still available to make the code backward compatible, but at the same time there should be some option where in a deprecated tool can be promoted to the new tool available without impacting the code.

Following are the benefits of this approach -

1) IT team can leverage the benefits of the new tool over existing and deprecated tools. For e.g. in my case I am using Salesforce connectors extensibly, I believe in contrast to the existing ones the new ones are using Bulk API and hence are relatively much faster.

2) It will save IT from reconfiguring/recoding the existing code and would save them considerable time.

3) As the tool keeps forward moving in its journey, it might help and make more sense to actually remove some of the deprecated tool versions (i.e. I believe it would not be the plan to have say 5 working set of Salesforce Input connectors - including deprecated ones). With this approach in place I think IT would be comfortable with removal of deprecated connectors, as they would have the promote option without impacting exsiting code - so it would ideally take minimal change time.

In addition, if it is felt that with new tools some configurations has changed (should ideally be minor), those can be published and as part of
promotions IT can be given the option to configure it.

Thanks,

Rohit Bajaj

So, best practice is to add annotations - so how many times have you seen an annotation that says 

"This filters for column y" and then it's been changed to something else in the meantime.  

Alteryx provides some default annotations, but wouldn't it be amazing if those metadata fields were available in an easy way to include in your own annotations

I imagine this working like so:

On an input tool:

"The file {filename} comes in from Joe in accounts every Tuesday and is currently {rows} big."

Filter tool

"This filters out the salaries above 100k with the formula {expression}"

Join

"I join using the {fields} fields rather than the typical key because the key isn't well populated"

Union

"I combine {IncomingNames} sets"

Formula

"The expression {expression1} calculates the exposure then {expression2} converts to bps."

Input, SQL Server

"The data source {databasename} is owned by Joe Soap in Investment"

Suddenly it makes sense to use annotations, and they don't lie (as easily) and mislead you into believing something other than the inherent logic, but with flexibility to select which bits of the metadata of the tool make sense to you.

Alteryx must have this functionality under the hood with the auto annotation, and this just provides better flex for that.

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

If you copy a text box named ClientCode to another workflow, the name of the box will be reset to text box(#) in that new workflow. That can be a snag if the workflow the text box is contained in is deployed to gallery as an app that is ran via the gallery API... the API parameters will be looking for a text box named ClientCode but is now named text box(#). This happens almost in the background without the developer knowing they have renamed the text box and the ES eventually failing. This can be annoying; it would be great if the name were inhereted. 

Hi, All!

Alteryx' interface is currently in English, but Alteryx' help is available not only in English, but also in French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese.

I would like to suggest there could be a way to select which language help should appear.

As a Brazilian reseller of Alteryx, it would be a great deal to us if I can configure help to be automatically loaded in Brazilian Portuguese.

Currently there is no way of doing this. Alteryx help simply cames in English, there is no choice in here.

Likewise, it would be beneficial to users in France and Germany as well.

During development it seems the syntax checker or whatever process runs behind the scenes after a tool is modified reviews the full workflow. 

Ex - Just from observation if I modify the file name in an output tool I don't see why it would rerun the full syntax check process.

This reduce the time waiting to continue development.

In SQL, obtaining partial sums in a grouped aggregation is as simple as adding "WITH ROLLUP" to the GROUP BY clause.

Could we get a "WITH ROLLUP" checkbox in the Summary Tool's confg panel in order to produce partial sums?

(This was initiated as a question here.)

Here is an example of without rollup vs. with rollup, in SSMS:

(Replacing "NULL" with the phrase "(any)" or some such, and we have a very useful set of partial sums.

Would love for the text areas in the configuration window to allow for a Find/Replace text search. Especially useful if you have long/nested/complex calcs that reference the same field multiple times and then you change that field's name or want to replicate the same formula for another field.

It would be great if we could make use of HTML5, in the same way the new formula tool will, by enabling autocomplete in all relevant tools - Filter, Multi-Row/Multi-Field Formula etc...

Alteryx should really get into the business of having a metadata management tool integrated into the UI.

We recently started training new users with Alteryx, making it more widespread than the few (less than 10) that already had it.  The good and bad of Alteryx is that it really allows us the power to do work we've never done before.  That also means that we've not had to worry too much about resource contention before either.  But with great power comes great responsibility and now we do need to think find a way to manage this power.

There are some good new ideas out there that use the concept of cloud-sourced data governance (specifically, I just checked out Alation).  But why should we have to go to two separate platforms then to examine our data? 

I already know that if I have to spend more time switching back and forth between two platforms to get the same job done with greater care will result in many people taking shortcuts.  Why couldn't this or something like it be integrated into Alteryx?

Would like to direclty query Hyperion Cube / Essbase data source directly - please propose functionality in next release or add a user macro to the gallery.  Thanks -cb

When using horizontal layout the status messages can overlap those of other tools meaning % progress can't be read:

Status labels would be better placed above the tools, not to the right.

I'm curently creating  an app using interface tools to control multiple worklflows.  It would be nice if I didnt have to physically drag the interface tool to the recceiving node.  For example, right now I can click on the Left node of a join tool and it gives me the option to make connections to that tool or out of that tool wireless.  It would be nice if I could right click and have an option to select from a list of interface tool incoming connections.