News

Alteryx Taps AWS Redshift for Data Blending

• By David Ramel
• 09/14/2015

Alteryx Inc. announced in-database data blending with the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) Redshift data warehousing service as part of its updated flagship data blending and analytics product.

Data blending generally involves collecting data from various discrete sources, combining it and weeding out unneeded information to prepare the relevant data for analytics.

With Alteryx Analytics 10.0, analysts can use Redshift's extensive cloud resources for in-database data blending at petabyte scale.

"With these new capabilities, the data processing within an Alteryx analytic workflow can be pushed into Amazon Redshift, where it can be executed using the vast computing resources of the AWS cloud," Alteryx said. "This results in a dramatic performance improvement when blending data with the very large data sets that many analysts use to drive decisions involving customer analysis, inventory levels, financial transactions, marketing campaign optimization and more."

The updated product reflects the company's contention that today's data analysts are using databases as more than just mere data repositories, but rather as analytics platforms.

"We use Alteryx with Amazon Redshift because we need a fast way to uncover insights about our customer behavior," the company quoted Julian Dell, an exec at a company customer called amaysim, as saying. "The combination of Alteryx Analytics with Amazon Redshift providing fast in-database data blending and in-memory advanced analytics lets us get insights from the complex XML-based customer and call records we have, without a long development effort. This enables us to identify and respond to drivers of customer behavior faster than ever before."

The Alteryx product blends internal, third-party and cloud data, facilitating analysis with spatial and predictive drag-and-drop tools in one single workflow that doesn't require programming expertise, the company said.

"Amazon Redshift offers customers a simple, cost-effective way to store and analyze large amounts of data" said company exec Paul Ross. "The combination of Alteryx Analytics 10.0's in-database blending with Amazon Redshift provides line-of-business analysts with a unique opportunity to answer critical questions faster and with all the data sets available to them, unlike ever before."