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A fantastic ETL, data munging, data prep, and data processing tool
November 22, 2017

A fantastic ETL, data munging, data prep, and data processing tool

Joe Root | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Alteryx Analytics

Alteryx use began in the marketing department to help automate data prep pre-Tableau from data sourced from Salesforce. It is now also being used by the IT department to help join multiple data sources to automate data munging for some standard report generation. The primary business problem Alteryx helps our team with is helping analyst move much more quickly by building data workflows visually instead of creating hundreds to thousands of lines of code to move and prep the same data.
  • Data ingestion: Alteryx is capable of connecting with a multitude of data sources from SQL databases to cloud-hosted solutions like Salesforce, Tableau, or Google Analytics. Also supports OleDB & ODBC connections.
  • Dynamic data munging: Alteryx has a great variety of processing tools to clean and prep data including: dedupe, formulas, joins, union, sort... Performing these functions really quickly on even moderately equipped laptops or desktops. It's dynamic in that it can easily handle changes in data by allowing extra columns to flow through.
  • Macros: have a process that you are consistently running in separate workflows? Build a macro, be it a batch or iterative, Alteryx can do it. I've built 40-50 macros and use at least 4+ in every workflow I design so data is handled the same way in every workflow for consistency and cutting down on copy/pastes.
  • I've had issues with the scheduler tool getting frozen or stuck in previous versions. For about the last 2-3 months the latest software version has been much more reliable. Previously I had to restart the Alteryx service on my machine at least once a week, which meant my workflows weren't running while the service had been stuck and data wasn't moving.
  • Some of the connectors, like the Tableau Online connector, should become supported by Alteryx. The online community is fantastic and has created a ton of useful macros and it would be great if Alteryx would adopt, support, and enhance some of the most widely used and useful.
Alteryx's UI is fantastic insomuch that training can really be self-driven, albeit with several Google searches a day and visits to the Alteryx community. The other solutions we looked at were much less intuitive and not nearly as flexible, automated, and didn't give you the capability to watch the data be changed through every step of the process like Alteryx can do through browses and data samples.
I believe Alteryx's connectivity is second to none. With full ODBC and OleDB support along with a bunch of standard connectors, I don't know of another tool that can connect to as many data sources as Alteryx. Alteryx is fantastic at joins and takes out the mystery of left/inner/right by allowing you to preview the data pre-join and post-join quickly and easily to troubleshoot any issues.
While Alteryx server is better suited for this purpose than my desktop tool, it is still capable of sharing data through publishing wherever needed or by building simplistic reports in tool and delivering via email.
Alteryx can do so much more than I use it for, so I believe the only case where Alteryx wouldn't be needed is when a department/team had a full development team to prep data pre-analysis or already has a central data store fully stood up and standardized. Alteryx works extremely well with a multitude of BI and database solutions and would be a great fit for any team trying to speed up the typical daily grind of data prep and ETL so their analytics and data team can be more agile, accurate, and automated.

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