Have you considered Alteryx for analytics of your Big Data

Alteryx is all about the thrill of solving Big Data problems and getting quicker answers.

What makes Alteryx unique as an analytics platform is the flexibility it gives to analyze Big Data from multiple sources to deliver business insights easily. It supercharges your Data in Data Visualization.

When you work with a huge amount of Big Data, you end up spending more time searching for information than on the analytics itself. In some cases, the other teams in your organization may have already collected the same information or performed a similar analysis, and there is a chance, you are not aware of it. As a result, data assets proliferate, compounding the problem and creating inefficiencies in Data Visualization with delays in answering critical business questions.

• Alteryx takes a different approach to analytics. The platform is purpose-built to create new data partnerships between IT, analytic teams, and the various lines of business. With Alteryx, whether you are an analyst or data scientist, you can solve even the most complex analytic business problems, with less time and effort, to drive business-changing outcomes across your organization. It provides you with a remarkable analytics experience during Data Visualization that combines the power of data cataloguing with human insight and empowers you to quickly and easily find, manage, understand, and collaborate on the information that resides in your organization.

• Alteryx makes your data more searchable and trackable, by giving you powerful data lineage and cataloguing that provides increased visibility for governance. Data discovery and data security are made breathtakingly easy with Alteryx.

• It provides many built-in data connectors and there are additional ones available for download from the Gallery. This list currently includes tools such as Google Sheets, Salesforce, Marketo, and others. If you require a connection to an API or web service that Alteryx does not already provide a tool for, you could build a connector using Alteryx. The Alteryx Download tool essentially lets you construct and make calls to any API, and subsequently save the repeatable process as a workflow, app, or even macro that can be used as a new connector.

We also have information on how to build a connector with Alteryx, but we’ll come to that a little later. Before that we have a quick review for you based on our personal experience with Alteryx.

We think that the user interface is fantastic. With no experience with Alteryx, we were able to familiarize ourselves with the platform within a short span of time.

Some of the features that excited us about Alteryx are:

• Loading data: You can bulk access and blend data from various data sources (flat files, data warehouses, relational databases, Social Media platforms, SQL databases, Hadoop Data and other big data and cloud sources).

• Data tools: Alteryx provides a plethora of easy-to-use logical tools.

• Browse tool: At every step you can run the workflow and browse at the output generated to ensure that your workflow is headed in the right direction

• Blending and Joining: The speed and ease at which you can crunch and combine data is powerful.

• Statistical tools: Alteryx has inbuilt R tools for statistical analysis. You don’t need to know how to code just as long as you know which tool to use, Alteryx will do the rest for you. If you’re a coder, you can use the R integration to customize the workflow.

• Analytics: Users can perform predictive and spatial analytics with a click of a button. You can create analytics applications with a single workflow.

• Output: You can write your output data in any form you want – from excels and CSVs to Tableau .tde extracts to an SQL database.

• Scheduling: With the Alteryx scheduler, you can automate the running of workflows.

• Alteryx Analytics Gallery: A central repository of applications built in Alteryx for analysts to use.

Overall, Alteryx provides a fast-track to analyzing insights. Analysts no longer have to spend hours in getting the data in the right form to generate quick insights but more importantly, we don’t need to be a coding genius to accomplish this.

Here is what one of the users has to say,

“Alteryx is particularly well-suited for demographic analysis and drive time analysis. Anything at the block group level seems to run quickly and without a hitch. Below though things get bogged down and slow. I would never suggest Alteryx as a map visualization software as this function is not user friendly and does not create presentation-quality results. While the software was originally known for its geospatial function and integration, it seems the company is moving its focus away from this – nice in some ways as R functionality and others have been added, but disappointing as I don’t expect improvement in the existing geospatial tools.”

But there is a flipside as well. The map visualization is not very effective so if you are considering map presentations then Alteryx is not a good option. Also, the program fails to read or update the workstream and causes errors. And there are caps on data limits and inefficient run times despite of the tool being touted as big data friendly.

Let’s talk at info@nabler.com

Let us help you change your analytics game with Alteryx by super charging your Big Data in Data visualization by blending, cleansing and enriching it.