A few years back, we mentioned a open source YXDB reader/writer on LinkedIn. After that, a whole lot of nothing. It turns out that Alteryx did release the open source YXDB code, but it was so stealth that no one noticed. This code is used inside of an R plugin, which had to be GPL’s because of R’s licence. But since it was never published as a way to read/write YXDBs, no one noticed.
The thread on LinkedIn was recently revived, so I decided it was time to expose it to a bigger audience.
Sometimes you need to look back in order to look forwards. Sometimes its just nostalgia. While we are hard at work in Boulder designing and building Alteryx 10.0, I thought it would be interesting to go back to where it all started. Continue reading
A few people have been using the macro I wrote about in Alteryx: Wildcard Inputs, but have an issue with XLSX files. The first thing to remember is that these macros I post (on my personal blog) are examples only and are not a supported part of the product. I am happy to give people advice on how they might take what I did and extend it. However, in this case, I thought it might make a good post about Alteryx macros with optional parameters, so I went ahead and did it anyway. Continue reading
One of the really great strengths of Alteryx is that is can handle any amount of data that you throw at it. If your data is small enough, it might all be in memory, but when Alteryx gets more data than fits, it silently swaps out to disk. This way people are routinely processing data sets that are 2, 10 or even 100 times bigger than they have enough memory for!
Mostly the user never notices this aspect of the Alteryx engine and it just works. There are times though when we get feature requests that would be much easier to implement if all the data was in memory. One example of that is aggregate functions in the formula tool. Since other desktop products that are similarly easy to use, like Tableau and Excel, have simple SUM and AVG type functions in their formulas, it is assumed that Alteryx would too. Continue reading
One of the most common questions I get about Alteryx is: “How can I make my module run faster?” Although Alteryx can be very fast, since it is such a general tool, it is only as good as the module that you have authored. There is a very simple guideline that you can follow to make a module faster: do less work. The most common example of doing less work is to use the select tool as early as possible to remove fields that you are no longer using. In order to walk you through the process I use to make an Alteryx module run faster, I am going to walk through the process of optimizing my Percentile Macro to run as fast as possible.
Update – there is an updated version of this macro in the post: Alteryx: Optimizing Modules for Speed.
There was a recent question on the Alteryx forum: How to use the percentile in summarize. The question misunderstands the percentile function in the summarize and is looking for something slightly different, although with similar math. So what does the percentile in the Summarize tool do? From the help:
Percentile: Calculates the specified percentile value for the group. The percentile is calculated by sorting the data and returning the row value relative to the specified percentile and its position in the sorted array – the largest value is the 100th percentile, lowest value is the 0 percentile, median is the 50th percentile, the 25th percentile is the value in the middle of the median and minimum, etc.
The Alteryx engine is known for being fast. I would like to think that the processing engine is as fast or faster than any other data engine out there. I learned how to program on a computer with 16 KB of memory and a 2 MHz 8 bit CPU. Learning how to program in an environment like that forces you to learn how to count bits and clock cycles. Taking that mentality and applying it to a modern computer leads to very quick processing.
The difficulty though is that Alteryx is limited to the speed it can read & write data from where it is stored. Having a super fast data processing engine doesn’t help if you have to pull a terabyte of data from a data warehouse only to find a subset of it and produce a report. It doesn’t help to be fast if it is slow to get the needed data.
Sorry for the lack of posts the last few weeks – I have been busy few weeks heads down working on a futures project (code named LockIn.) I went as far as turning off email and IM to get some real focus. It was very productive – I haven’t produced that much code in a while.
Anyway, this week I have a very quick post answering a question from the Alteryx forums. The questions asks: How do I skip the last N records from a data stream. Skipping the 1st N is very easy, just use the sample tool, but it doesn’t have a mode to skip the last N. Continue reading
There is now an update to this post at: Alteryx: XSLX Wildcard inputs – read both to see how it comes together.
Wow, what a conference that was last week! I loved meeting all kinds of amazing customers in the Solutions Center and getting all kinds of product feedback, as well as being able to help people solve their problems. In particular, if you haven’t seen it, check out Adam’s Blog Macro Pack. He took a bunch of macros from this blog as well his and Chris Love’s and packaged them up with a cool installer so they show up in your tool palate.
Much of the feedback is already under consideration by product management and some of it has already been put on the development teams backlogs for Alteryx 9.1. There was one request in specific though that is actually much easier to implement as a macro then it would be as a native tool. The customer asks:
While I know that the input tool will accept a wildcard, it fails if the schemas are different. How do a read a set of files using a wildcard when the schemas don’t exactly match?
Before I start, let me say that I am looking forward to seeing lots of my readers next week at Inspire. You will most often find me in the Solutions Center. Please don’t hesitate to come ask questions, give suggestions or just chat. I love the opportunity to teach & learn.
Recently I got a question on our internal support board: How do I parse a file that is Ctrl-A delimited? Normally for reading delimited files you just read the file as a CSV and set the delimiter in the input settings and you are done. The problem with Ctrl-A is that it is a special (unprintable) character and it is not possible to set in the GUI. The normal backup for parsing issues like this – the Text To Columns tool – has the same limitation. Continue reading
Inspiring Ingenuity 