Alteryx Desktop and Cloud Native Engine Difference

Cloud Native and Standard tools function differently. Cloud Native tools are often combinations of transformations, whereas Standard tools in the Desktop environment are used directly as native functions.

In the Desktop environment, data wrapping is utilized, allowing Alteryx to connect directly to files with native support for formats like CSV, Parquet, Excel, and YXDB, as well as database connections.

In the Cloud environment, data reading and writing are managed through a conversion service. This service converts different file formats into CSV or Parquet, enabling web applications and other services to process the data as needed.

Separating data input and output from data processing impacts workflow orchestration. In Desktop, input, output, and processing actions occur simultaneously, but in Cloud, these are separated. As a result, tools like Block Until Done and Containers are not fully compatible with the Cloud environment.

The output results may differ between Standard (Desktop) and Cloud Native environments due to differences in logic handling. Cloud Native supports three-valued logic, which affects the output of certain expressions and tools that rely on the expression editor. For instance, in Cloud Native, a filter condition such as Null != 2 will evaluate Null as False, whereas in Standard (Desktop), it evaluates as True.

Designer Cloud does not support the Size attribute and instead uses a subset of Designer Desktop data types: Bool, Float (equivalent to Double in Designer Desktop), Integer, String, Date, and Datetime.

To prevent truncation in Find Replace, for example, enabling the option UseDefaultStringSizes will maintain the initial field size. However, it’s also important to check how other tools, such as Transpose and Formula, handle field sizes to avoid unwanted truncation.

Different function sets are available in Standard (Designer Desktop) versus Cloud Native. Additionally, the three-valued logic in Cloud Native impacts the results of certain expressions, particularly in math and boolean functions. For example, in Cloud Native, Null<5 evaluates to Null, whereas in Standard, it evaluates to False. Similarly, Average(Null, 5) returns Null in Cloud Native, while in Standard, it returns 2.5.