How we reduced a 6-hour runtime in Alteryx to 9 minutes in dbt

In-Depth Discussions
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at How we reduced a 6-hour runtime in Alteryx to 9 minutes in dbt | dbt Developer Blog

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Hi dbt,
I only read the first part of this post and noticed that the Alteryx workflow is not using in-database processing , whereby the query is submitted and performed in-database . As such the comparison highlighted of hours down to minutes is not realistic as Alteryx would use these push down optimisations and hence perform the query in minutes not hours.

I’d recommend you take the time to read the material below to fully understand Alteryx’s capabilities , before making these types of comparisons

Alteryx allows several additional benefits , optimised in-database queries can be performed in snowflake as well as many other databases visually without code ,or with code if you insist.
The business user can understand the workflow as it’s visual and not a heap of code , with Alteryx you don’t need an army of sql developers. Last but not least the result of an in-database process can be streamed automatically to an analytical process without the need of an intermediary table . Thereby reducing the overall process considerably , more cost effectively and more securely.
Regards Jeremy

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Hello @Jeremyappleyard,

Thank you for sharing your insights and emphasizing the capabilities of Alteryx’s in-database processing. We appreciate your feedback and the additional information you provided about optimized queries.

We understand that you may have missed some parts of the post, which could have caused some confusion. We want to clarify that the purpose of this post is to report on our client’s specific implementation of Alteryx + SQLServer and the improvements we made to their data pipeline by leveraging dbt’s resources and Snowflake’s computing power. We did not intend to claim that one solution is definitively superior to the other, nor did we argue that the client’s implementation of Alteryx was optimal. Thank you for your feedback, and we hope that the clarifications provided shed more light on the context and intention of our post.
Best regards, the authors