Benchmarking An Alteryx Batch Macro (Group By vs. Control Parameters)

Introduction

This is a short article that examines Alteryx batch macro run-time performance. Specifically, I examine the run-time difference achieved for a Group by formulation versus a Control parameter formulation for a particular application.

Even after creating hundreds of macros in Alteryx, there is still room for me to learn new things! This is one of the significant aspects of Alteryx – you will never stop learning! Additionally, I have been adding Bonus Materials to this article which explores Master Class usage of Alteryx batch macros. Those videos are found at the end of this article.

The Problem Set-Up

In this example, an 8.5 million line file is ingested. Within this file is information on about 50,000 vehicles, each with between 150 and 200 data records. In this study, I configured the macro in two different ways:

Control Parameters
Group By

The batch macro approach is used to process specific information for each vehicle. I will not discuss what this macro does, but rather, I will discuss how the run-time can be impacted by how the macro is configured.

For each constructed macro, I ran a variable number of records to learn about any speed differences (run-time) that might occur. For this study, I chose 3, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000, 10000, and 49653 (the whole file) records for comparison.

Results

Figure 1 shows the run-time difference that resulted from the Control Parameter and Group By formulations. The explanation of why these differences occur is included in an annotation box, as well as in the accompanying video that is shown below.

Although I like how Figure 1 shows the time difference between the methods, the true insight of how the methods perform is shown in Figure 2. As the number of vehicles processed increases, the Group By feature is significantly more efficient than the Control Parameter approach. The Group By approach is 8.6X faster (5145/598) when computing the complete data set.

Figure 2 – The number of vehicles processed per minute for each method used in the batch macro. Clearly, the Group By usage is computationally more efficient for problems like this one.

The Video Explanation

I describe this example in detail in this video. I think it is worth 10 minutes of your time if you want to learn more about Alteryx batch macros.

Benchmark results for two types of Alteryx batch macro formulations.

Other Batch Macro Insights

By clicking here you can access other articles I have written about batch macro uses in Alteryx.

By clicking here you can access the excellent article by DanM on the Alteryx community site.

Bonus Material: Alteryx Master Classes on Batch Macros

Here is some bonus material for people who really want to become more advanced builders of Alteryx macros. These examples are intended to inspire viewers by showing the art of the possibilities of using Alteryx batch macros.

Using Alteryx batch macros to replicate Tableau dashboards! Who would have imagined that this would be possible? Well, I did, and now you can learn how this is done, too. To see part 2 of this series, just down past the following video, and you will find it!

In this example, I show I use batch macros to accomplish some computationally-intensive work. This is more of a high-level overview intended to inspire viewers to try more complex tasks in Alteryx.

In this example, I use the old-school DOS batch macro approach to accomplish some great work in a short amount of time. Sometimes we don’t need the full power of Alteryx to do the things we do, which was the case in this example.

As always, thanks for reading/viewing!

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