Indianapolis, IN
Welcome to the Indianapolis User Group
Click in the JOIN GROUP button to follow our news and attend our events!
Thanks to everyone who came to our first virtual meeting! It was great to see such a wide variety of alteryx skill levels come together to learn.
Here is a quick recap of the event:
Christine Assaad (@christine_assaad) from Alteryx introduced AMP, alteryx’s next generation engine. It was introduced in 2020.2, and more tools were converted to AMP with 2020.3. AMP allows alteryx to take advantage of your machine’s multi-threaded processing power. It should allow for workflow to run (even) faster than the old engine. It’s currently available when you check the box on the runtime tab. This allows you to run workflows with and without AMP to see just how powerful the new engine can be. There were some great questions from the audience, and Christine has provided some details on a couple questions:
How the performance will look like if multiple AMP enabled workflows are running at the same time?
We have done a few experiments. Typically, each workflow will slow down by about a factor of the number of workflows that are running. That is, if you run three workflows at a time, each one will take about three times longer to run. The “about” is important there. It can go faster than that. It can be that running three concurrently will finish faster than running those same three in series. However, if those workflows need a lot of memory, it can run slower than that. If you have given the workflows a memory limit which added up over the workflows will significantly exceed the physical memory of the computer, you can crash the computer.
Is there anything to watch out for when increasing the sort/join memory usage while running WFs in AMP?
We recommend administrators verify that the memory limits given to workflows times the number of workflows allowed to run fits in the physical memory on the computer. The memory limits are not just for Sort and Join, and they never were just for Sort and Join, so we are changing the term to just be “Memory Limit”.
For the Summarize tool, will the records be in order?
The order records coming from grouping (as used by Summarize, Multi-Row Formula, Sample and so on) in e1 was a sorted order. In AMP they are in a hashed order. This is for performance. You can put things into hash buckets by looking at them alone, while putting things into a sorted order requires comparing things with one another. A hashed order isn’t particularly useful, of course. It happens that people didn’t always need the sorted order. When the sorted order is needed, in AMP the user will need to add a sort tool to get the ordering.
For more information, Alteryx has a lot of content out there:
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/alteryx-amp-engine
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/Alteryx-Engine-and-AMP-Main-Differences
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/AMP-Memory-Use
https://help.alteryx.com/current/designer/tool-use-amp
https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Engine-Works/AMPlify-your-Workflows/ba-p/617590
Alter Everything Podcast: https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alter-Everything-Podcast/66-The-Alteryx-AMP-Engine-Explained/ba-p/5...
Next, Digan (@patrick_digan) went through some various alteryx updates:
Inspire Analyticon will be in Dallas June 7-10, 2021. You can register here. We hope to see you all there! https://bit.ly/33Y9zG9
The Alteryx User Experience Team invites everyone to participate in a survey to explore tool usage, ease of use, and usefulness. https://bit.ly/3dDHYyB
While Alteryx 2020.3 came out last week, the Alteryx 2020.4 beta is open for those who want to see new features and provide valuable feedback. http://beta.alteryx.com/
For those who needed some extra incentive to complete weekly challenges, we’re offering swag for Indianapolis User Group members who can complete the most weekly challenges before our next meeting! If you didn’t get a chance to give us your alteryx community name during our meeting, it’s not too late! Just send a private message to @patrick_digan and let him know you’re interested in participating. Happy solving!
For those who are interested in creating weekly challenges, you can send them to ACADEMY@ALTERYX.COM. It’s fun seeing people solve a problem your problem!
To finish off the meeting, we had a friendly competition between the user group leaders. There were multiple choice questions from 4 different categories: Alteryx Community, Indy User Group, Alteryx tools, and Alteryx Apps/Macros. Hopefully everybody was able to learn a thing or two along the way. After 21 challenging questions, Digan was able to take home the crown.
We can’t wait to see everybody at our next meeting. As always, we’d love to have more folks be involved/present! Don’t hesitate to reach out to one of the user group leaders!
