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Domain-specific data translations

In any large IT environment - you will have multiple systems which each use different nomenclature to describe the same thing

 

This relates to products; currencies; customers; suppliers; trade types; etc.

 

At present - our users are bridging this gap either by:

a) creating a bunch of excel spreadsheets with "Magic Code Translation Tables" - which is unfortunate because these become unmaintainable very quickly and live on people's desktops (and are not reusable assets) or

b) creating a whole morass of one-way-translation tables to translate from each input source to the normalized format - these are all hand-rolled translation tables; with hand-rolled ways of adding translations etc.

 

 

What would be very useful is to allow Alteryx users to specify these kinds of domain concepts on the Alteryx server, with a flexible way of adding synonyms.  For example - our master customer list is kept on the server with a master customer ID (call it MID for Master).   If I'm dealing with a new system that uses a different customer ID (call it NsID for New SystemID), then I can map the NsID to the MID centrally so that anyone who wants to do analytics on this data can just drag in a converter from NsID to MID; and also drag in the master customer list with the MIDs.

 

This would allow all these Magic Translation Tables to become an enterprise asset rather than isolated data islands, and act as an accelerator for every other team using this data.