Alteryx Server Ideas

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.

Starting with Windows Sever 2016 edition one could use Docker containers technology on windows environments. My idea is to dynamically convert Designer jobs/workflows  to Docker containers at runtime.

Dearest colleageues and comrades (Romans, countrymen?):

Have you ever queued up your jobs only to have them block your regularly scheduled programming? Imagine a world where, assuming you had multiple worker nodes, you can direct and prioritise your jobs on your terms.

This is what I am suggesting.

I've recently worked with Alteryx support, and they turned me on to a QoS setting in Alteryx Server settings. Peep this like a marshmallow chick in hot pink: 

After learning from the great Server Master Kevin Powney (blessed be his name), I learnt that there are currently 3 'channels' that this QoS variable governs. 0 is the highest priority used for workflows. 4 is used for chained apps. 6 is used for gallery service requests.

This will not do.

Why? Well, for one: hello arcane/memorisation.

Secondly, where is my control? I'm a millenial dammit! Service me!

So, my idea, that I want you to vote so highly on as to save yourself any myself a lot of hassle, is to allow a custom QoS variable to be a traffic variable. And here's how it works:

• For each workflow/app, you can assign it whatever QoS/traffic variable you choose. 
• This allows the user the power to control which 'lane' is clogged in the queue.

Example time! [cheers, candy thrown]

In my current situation, we have some jobs that are network-intensive (database calls), and jobs that are processing-intensive (CPU hogs doing hard-core maths). 

The network-intensive jobs run on the weekends so that we have the data in the morning on Monday. The processing-intensive jobs need to finish, but suck up all the CPU power. For the last couple of weeks, we've unsuccessfully run these jobs over the weekend. The downside is that since we cannot control how traffic flows (and we only have the 0/4/6 options in QoS, of which these only fit in the 0 lane [breath, sorry]) the CPU-heavy jobs have blocked more critical network jobs.

If we had two paths, we could assign the CPU jobs to lane 1 and the network jobs to lane 0 and they can run in parallel. And then my boss is happy. We like happy bosses, right?

Vote this up! My boss is awesome!

Thanks for your ear,

Hail Caesar or something.

-Cedric

Rather than schedule to put things on the 5th day or the 14th day of a month, we often want to schedule our flows to run on the 5th business day or the 14th business day. I know that the term 'business day' means different things in different parts of the world, but I think it would be a feature that many reporting-oriented departments would enjoy. Let people specify a formula or have a table to go off of for their definition of 'business day' and it should be easy to implement.

I would add a <scheduler> label to this but there isn't one.