Tableau Love

Storage and #Alteryx Analytics Hub Performance on #AWS - Part 1.

Introduction

The eternal question is not “Why am I here?”, “Is there life after death?”, or even “Does (s)he really love me, or is it all about my cool lightsaber collection?”

No, the real question we all want to be answered is “What sort of storage should I use with Alteryx Analytics Hub, and how should I lay it out?”.

Answering the question

To address this conundrum, I spent lots…

Moving Storage on Alteryx Analytics Hub

You’re going to be saving lots of assets in Alteryx Analytics Hub. Before you know it, you may fill up that hard drive of yours with all the wonderful things you’ve created. What’s a person to do when they’re maxing out storage and still creating so much joy? If you didn’t realize, joy requires hard disk space.

Never fear. Don’t postpone joy. Just move your storage.

Alteryx Analytics Hub (AAH)…

#Alteryx Analytics Hub on Windows 10? @alteryx

Yay! Alteryx Analytics Hub is officially here, so I’m installing it on my personal laptop – a MacBook Pro running Windows 10 under Parallels.

Wait, can you actually install Alteryx Analytics Hub on Windows 10? Sure.

Is it supported? Nope. Products such as Hub should be deployed to a clean server operating system. That’s just how it goes.

Some of my colleagues have already been…

Can #Alteryx Analytics Hub use AWS Simple AD?

Yes. You can leverage AWS’s Simple AD for authentication purposes.

Configuring same is pretty straight forward except for one wrinkle, which I’ll highlight below.

In this example, I’m telling Hub to leverage the throw-away AD domain “russch.com”, which is running on AWS.

Most of the suggested values work pretty well on LDAP Settings screen. Except for this one, which is the…

Automate EVERY DAMN THING on #Alteryx Server.Next @alteryx

Many (and I do mean many) years ago, I found myself hovering near the cube of an esteemed mentor, trying to soak up as many words of wisdom as possible.

I heard this:

If I have to do something manually more than 3 times, I write a script and automate the process in question.

– Chris, a very smart person.

Chris was right, of course. Since then I’ve always tried to automate…

  Backups are for cowards!

The other day I heard a rumor that backing up your Alteryx server.next is a good thing. 

That advice sounds fishy to me since bad things never happen to good people. For example, my personal WordPress site didn’t just get totally nuked for reasons unknown to me, but whatever.

Beta 3 doesn’t yet include a backup utility, so if you want to play…

Avoid SSL Errors With #Alteryx Server.Next

Just a quick note on a mistake to avoid when leveraging SSL with Server.Next. I didn’t. And I wasted 2 hours. And I’m bitter. 

In the settings.yml file, you’ll find the ayxserver_cert_location and ayxserver_key_location properties which you’ll use to point to your SSL cert and key. Cool.

settings.yml

When you get your certificate and key, it’s not uncommon to receive an interme…

#Alteryx Server.Next Data Sources, Credentials, and Connections

This year I’m using reverse psychology on myself. I will not blog. I will not blog. I will not blog.

Beta 3 of Alteryx Server.Next is just around the corner, so I thought I’d start adding materials that might be helpful for those who are brand new to the product. Some of this stuff will be high-level, some will be nitty-gritty technical.

Today we’ll talk about how Server.Next deals with data…

#Alteryx user of In-Database? I'm looking for feedback! @alteryx

Do you use our In-DB tools? Have opinions? Issues? Want to move the feature forward? Maybe (or maybe not) you’re even attending Inspire?

Please reach out to me! Want to put you together with someone at Alteryx who’d just love to speak with you.

Use the “Contact Me” item on the right-hand menu, hit my Twitter or LinkedIn page at the very bottom of the page, or mail me (first letter of my…

Loading Data into #Alteryx Connect!

So, we have Connect up and running. It’s now time to ingest data. I chose several different data sources to go after in order to get a feel for how Connect works:

TPC-H data from the sample Snowflake TPCH_SF1 database schema

Five different databases I have sitting on an instance of PostgreSQL running under AWS RDS

A (file system) folder full of random CSV files

The contents of two sites on my…

#Alteryx: Let's Connect! Installing Connect for fun and profit.

Yes. That was cheesy.

Today we’re going to install Connect, Alteryx’s Data Catalog. Later, we’ll ingest (load) some data from Snowflake, PostgreSQL, a file system, and Tableau. And then we’ll dance.

The Windows Machine

I gave Connect a t2.2xlarge, just like the Alteryx Server boxes. I provisioned the machines in the exact same way, too. All my machines are sitting on a private network,…

@Alteryx: Installing Server - Part II - Disk, Mongo, Workers! #alteryx

So, we were installing Alteryx Server and I got a wee bit distracted and wanted to figure out which components start in what order and what files they used.

I’ve satisfied that urge, so let’s continue with more configuration screens.

Disk, Disk, Disk

There are multiple properties that let you define where you should “store stuff”. For example (and at the highest level), where the…

#Alteryx: Machine Provisioning, Installing @Alteryx Server, seeing how stuff works.

We’ll start by installing Alteryx Server on a single node to see how it goes. Spoiler ahead: It went well. I had more trouble with the Windows box than I did with Alteryx itself!

The Windows Box

Since I’m on AWS, I have many, many choices in terms of the hardware to run. This is a good thing, because I can experiment with different combinations of RAM, CPU, and disk until I hit the…

#Alteryx and Parquet? Sure. Why not?

Original working title: How the Python Tool lets you to any damn thing you want

Want an easy way to either read or write Parquet files in Alteryx? Use Apache Arrow (more specifically PyArrow) and the Python Tool.

With just a couple lines of code (literally), you’re on your way. Here. I’m loading a csv file full of addresses and outputting to parquet:

from ayx import Package from ayx…

Setting up your #Alteryx enviornment on #aws. Amaze and impress your friends. Or something.

For those of you who spend a lot of time standing up environments in the cloud, or for those of you who just don’t care, this post will be “meh”.

But for everyone else, you’ll probably be able to pick up a hint or two. Some of what I’ll point out is conventional wisdom, there are a few hard-earned lessons from yours truly, and there’s some very opinionated personal preference thrown in, too.

Alteryx: Have a Plan

Before embarking on a project, try to have some sort of a map. Here’s what I’m setting up today on AWS:

Alteryx on AWS. Yummy.

At the highest level:

I’m creating a distinct Virtual Private Cloud to host everything Alteryx

My public network doesn’t contain anything of value

The private subnet is where the good stuff is. None of these resources are directly available via the internet.

I’m running…