Alteryx is a good tool for analytics productivity
April 30, 2018
Alteryx is a good tool for analytics productivity
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Alteryx Analytics
My team has been running Tableau reports for clinicians, researchers, and leadership in our organization. As we have developed more reports we had strong needs of managing data pipelines in a systematic way. In many cases, ETL processes were managed individually by data developers and analysts and there were issues of report ownership, data consistency, and management issues. We adopted Alteryx and automated two types of processes: ETL processes and Tableau data extract creation. Alteryx provided values in terms of systemized pipeline management and query performance.
- Alteryx provides an integrated workflow management environment for data blending, analytics, and reporting. It is also very extensible to be connected to a variety of data connections including major databases (Oracle, etc.), analytics tools (R), and visualization tools such as Tableau through its plugins. Our department used Oracle and Tableau already and it was well integrated with Alteryx.
- The workflow authoring environment in Desktop is easy to use so that most of the users (if they are a bit skilled data developers or analysts) may not need the training to use its basic functions. Drag and drop interface and icons are intuitive to understand.
- When running Alteryx workflows, it is easy to monitor and track what's the progress by seeing percentages. It is helpful to balance and manage bandwidths of database servers, especially when to populate large data sets.
- Sometimes the desktop version of authoring tool crashes! It's been unstable in the previous versions but gets better. Even if it doesn't crash, it used to be slow or not responding.
- When running several version of database drivers in local machine or server, it is tricky to set up database connections. Often you have to figure out it by googling the problem and solution. There are not many knowledge bases from Alteryx.
- Alteryx project file creates .bak file automatically. It is useful to prevent for the purpose of back up, sometimes it's not necessary. But it is not changeable for some reason. By default, it always creates backups.
We did not do any comparison of Alteryx with other tools, but before Alteryx we used Sandbox tables in our databases. It caused a lot of issues in terms of data consistency, workflow automation, and patient data privacy and security. Using Alteryx resolved a lot of the issues.