I just upgraded to Alteryx 10.0 today and wanted to share my findings. Overall the upgrade was quite seamless though they do require an uninstall of the prior version effectively preventing true side-by-side comparisons on the same box. Below are some key new features that jumped out at me.
Browse Anywhere
Probably the most popular feature everyone was looking forward to was the new “Browse Anywhere” option which is indeed very handy. You can now view a sample of data flowing through any tool by simply selecting the tool and viewing the Results panel (formerly called output). Note how the results screen now has several icons on the left that represent different viewing tabs.
These new viewing tabs allow you to see the data stream for any incoming or outgoing connection to the tool. This is extremely helpful for debugging work. My understanding is that this “Browse Anywhere” sample is limited to 1MB of data, so if you’re stream is larger than that, it will only display some of the starting rows. My hope is that they will eventually allow you to also easily filter the results within the viewing area.
All New Icons
Hey, what’s a new version worth if it doesn’t look new? They’ve revamped all their icons with more bold colors and adapted illustrations in some cases.
New In-DB Tools
It’s great to see them adding new tools to the In-DB category including Macro support and Dynamic input/output options.
I also noticed some new options within the tools themselves. The Stream In tool, for example, now allows you to specify if you want to use a temp table (the old default) or a custom table you’ve already setup which would be very handy if you had stored procedures setup to run against known tables.
New Summarize Options
Alteryx was already great when it came to the summarize tool, especial for handling text fields. Their First and Last options were extremely handy (especially for someone who’s tried to do that through SQL). They’ve now added even more options including Longest, Shortest, CountDistinctNonNull, etc.
Well, that’s all for now. You can find the official release notes here, and I’ll keep posting things as I come across them.
Sculpting Data 