Speed Tips: 20 Tips in 20 Minutes

[Alteryx_KB]

Title: Speed Tips - 20 Tips in 20 Minutes

Presenter: Esther Bezborodko & Joe Lipski

Abstract: Join 2 Alteryx ACEs (Esther Bezborodko and Joe Lipski) for a fast-paced exciting session of tips & tricks, shortcuts, timesavers, performance improvements and more. Anything is game, but the clock is ticking, can they beat their target of 40 tips in 40 minutes? Regardless of your skill level, you're sure to learn something new!

[seven]

At 07:45, Esther describes how to optimise Filter tools. She suggests that "it is always best" to remove multiple conditions from a Filter and break it into smaller Filters with solo conditions.

Sorry, this doesn't seem intuitive. If Alteryx scans 3.5 million rows with a complex Filter, it only has to scan them all once. If I break that Filter up into multiple filters, they will all combine to scan more than 3.5 million rows by definition. That doesn't seem faster.

I ran an experiment. I used the Performance Profile and compared a Filter tool with conditions A or B vs two Filter tools, as proposed, one filtering condition A and a subsequent tool filtering condition B. See the image below.

The complex Filter ran for 1.72 seconds while the cascading Filters ran for a combined 2.57 seconds.The results for this case seem conclusive to me.

As with any tip, it seems like a good rule to test it out yourself using the Performance Profile and validate that it is faster for your use case. I feel like this tip should not be delivered as an axiom.