Alteryx Penalty Card

[Kong]

This post is to share fun with you in Alteryx.

Being in the Alteryx realm for many years, it is one of the favorite tools to help us deal with data. There is knowledge building up from the ground and now having a number of people stepping into this area and starting the data journey.

In the journey, we have been asking the same questions over and over again about how to tune the performance. Providing evidence, principles, explaining the details, and so on have been done again and again. It is not fun enough.

One day, a team of us was discussing the same topic and suddenly came up with an idea on how to let everyone have fun learning this. Instead of lengthy paragraphs, diagrams, explanations, etc, we come up with an idea about Cards. It is simple, easy to capture and most importantly, it is fun.

We are here introducing Alteryx Penalty cards. They are cards to remind you of some Alteryx tips. Alteryx Penalty Card, obviously, is to let you know what degrades the performance.  Being Alteryx professionals, performance should always be in your mind.

Designing this card is not easy but lots of fun. I would say the cards are not perfect but we have put our passion into it. So, enjoy the cards and have fun together.  Share us with fun of what you think of a penalty situation.

We always hope to deliver a win-win situation. We can learn together and evolve together. We had fun with the cards and also hope you will also have fun.

Kindly share your views with us and let's continue with it. Learning should be interesting and fun.

cc @Sim, @Leo and @Anthony, our fancy and lovely team that are always with energy for the next journey :-).

Thanks for reading,

Kong

            

[Raj]

@Kong 
great idea!

[Qiu]

@Kong 
This is really fun and helpful. Thanks.

[Pang_Hee_Choy]

for two summarize. some time it required. (when find count of group by, where Alteryx does not support distinct count, distinct concat, and etc)

for two filter. some time it easier to understand. (and faster, for limited situation)

for two formula, it for other easier to understand. (especially it will overwrite/ depend formula columns above)

the rest is fully agreed.

another penalty:

1. output to excel hardcode for different group.

    multiple filter + output in excel.

    penalty 5/5

    cpu 1/5

    ram 1/5

2. do not align tool properly. all tools mess togethers.

    (at least have clear working flow, ease to see where data come from and go to)

    penalty 5/5

    cpu 1/5

    ram 1/5

[Kong]

Thanks for your reply @Pang_Hee_Choy.  Yes, in general, it does not require using two identical tools twice consecutively.  There are definitely cases not fallen into this.  The idea is that in general, use one tool would already be enough unless there is specific requirement that it cannot be achieved like what you said.  To be more precise, if the number of rows is huge, better to use one tool as it will significantly reduce the resources required.

Sometimes, readability is fighting against the performance.   When designing the workflow, I prefer readability but when it goes into production, I prefer performance.  It should strike a balance between both.  But in most of our experience, people tend to keep stating for readability for convenience.

Thanks for your suggestions on the additional penalty.  We will consider if it can be included in our next sets of cards.  But I think it also depends if we have feedback from the community to continue with this fun cards.

Let's evolve together :-)