Optimize Your Workflow

Do you want to make your workflow run faster? Below are a couple of tips to optimize the performance of your workflow.

Did you know that some tools such as the Join, Summarize and Unique perform a sort on the backend?

Performance Tip: If you sort the data before these tools it can help speed up your workflow!

Don't forget to Enable Performance Profiling if you want to see the timing of these tools!

In my example below, I am joining the Transactions.xml sample file with the Customers.csv sample file, stored in the SampleData folder packaged with Alteryx.

Another tip: Show Annotations with Tool Names option in your Workflow - Configuration pane shows you the actual tool number for your Input Tools. This helps when you are looking through the Results log.

Now when I add a Sort Tool before the Join Tool and sort by the field I am joining on, (in this case the Customer ID fields) it speeds up the Join!

In this instance it made it faster by several milliseconds, but if you think of all of the tools in your workflow, every millisecond counts!

Another Performance Tip: Remove spatial columns you don't need.

Did you know that Polygons and Spatial files take up a lot of space? If you don't need these columns, remove them in the beginning of your workflow.

In the example below I am connecting to the Sample_ZIP.yxdb and the Sample_ZIPs.yxdb.

Next, I added Select Tools before the Union Tool to remove the spatial columns.

As you see above, with the spatial columns removed, the timing went from 80 milliseconds down to 33!