Improve your Alteryx workflow speed by limiting records

by Naledi Hollbruegge

Alteryx is a powerful tool that can deal with an impressive amount of data. But this can take some processing time, and when working with large amounts of data you probably don’t want to wait several minutes for your data to be processed every time you change a setting or add a tool.

When parsing several jsons or importing multiple excel workbooks it makes sense to work out the structure of your workflow with one placeholder file first before doing it with all of them at once. When this is not an option, for instance when you are working with just one large file, you can tell Alteryx to just process a limited number of records. To do this, left-click the canvas to bring up the Workflow Configurations. From here you select the Runtime tab. Where it says “Record Limit for All Inputs” you can enter the number of records that should be processed when running the workflow, which should really help with the processing speed. Just remember to change the setting back to No Limit before you export your final output at the end!

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