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Data understanding is a crucial part of any business as it lays a foundation for what to do in the future. It will help us explore data in meaningful ways. Presenting data from multiple sources into useful information is a challenging task. Data being in different formats and different places make it difficult for the Organizations to pull it all together and perform analytics on it. To perform aggregations on data, the data should be in one place. This is where a Data Warehouse or a Data Lake will help solve the data centralization problem. A Data Lake or Data Warehouse allows us to load data from different sources. We can then make the data understandable by running analysis and analytics on top of the data. We can also apply prediction on historic data to predict future trends. Alteryx and MuleSoft are two such tools that help developers work with data in a lot of ways. In this post, I will give you a basic understanding of these tools. I will give brief information on how these tools are different from each other.
Alteryx is a self-service data analytics platform that is useful for data discovery, data preparation, deployment, and share analytics. It catalogs all the data making it searchable and trackable. users will have increased visibility for governance. Users can automate manual tasks into analytic workflows. These analytic workflows can be used as Extract, Transform, Load (ETL). Alteryx supports both code-less and advanced modeling with code. Not only data analytics, but it also supports predictive, spatial, and statistical analytics. Alteryx includes four components.
MuleSoft is an integration platform that connects data from on-premises and cloud computing environments. It can connect applications, data, and devices through an API approach. It creates a communication layer between two systems with the bidirectional flow. Users can easily build integration flows on the cloud. MuleSoft allows data to transform data using machine learning. It also enables users to employ CI/CD pipelines. The following are some of the services that the MuleSoft offers.
Both Alteryx and MuleSoft are great tools in their own way. Let us look at some of the differences between these tools.
Alteryx can connect to a variety of data sources like data warehouses, file formats, databases, data lakes, etc. It can read, write, or read and write, depending on the data source. It offers connectors for more than 80 data sources. Amazon S3, Hadoop, Databricks, Google BigQuery, IBM DB2, Microsoft Azure Data Lake Store, JSON, MySQL, MongoDB, SAP Hana, Salesforce, Text, Zip, Tableau Data Extract are some of the connectors that Alteryx provides.
MuleSoft offers a wide range of connections with assets and tools such as storage resources, databases, SaaS platforms, etc. It offers a total of around 300 connectors. Apache Kafka, Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics 365, MongoDB, ServiceNow, Redis, Twilio, SAP, NetSuite, Amazon DynamoDB, Apache Cassandra, Azure Data Lake Storage, FTP, FTPS, Hadoop are some of the popular MuleSoft connectors. However, MuleSoft does not provide connectors for cloud data warehouses.
Alteryx is the most popular data transformation tool. It provides a graphical interface with several actions as icons. Users can drag and drop the icons into the workspace to create a workflow. Once a data source is connected, users can perform data preparation tasks like setting data types, clean up missing values, apply transformer functions on the data, one-hot encoding, and many more. Users can also write macros in XML, and custom functions in C++ to add them to the workflow.
MuleSoft focuses more on application integration. To move data from a source to a destination, MuleSoft provides a graphical interface to map two data sources. It offers drag and drops functionality to construct the mappings. Users can also construct mappings through the DataWeave code. MuleSoft comes with 20 pre-built transformers. Users can also define their own transformers by writing code in JavaScript or Groovy. Then users can define the input and output of the components to fit the source schema with the destination schema.
Alteryx has various pricing models for various components.
Alteryx has a community, where it provides resolution documents for common issues. They also offer customer support through an email ticketing system with different support levels - standard, advanced, and premium. Alteryx provides several learning guides and starter kits to help users start working with the Alteryx components. It also has a training academy, known as Alteryx Academy, through which they provide live training, interactive lessons, and weekly challenges.
MuleSoft provides customer support through several mechanisms such as general forums, discussion groups, developer blogs, community, telephone, and email support. They provide a variety of training materials through training forums and resources. They provide instructor-led training, blog posts, quick start guides, product documentation, etc. They also conduct webinars now and then.
Conclusion
Every organization's requirements will be unique in its own way. Choosing the right tool for an organization always depends on the business needs. It also depends on the data sources that you want to use. So, check which tool offers connectors for the data sources that you need and select the one that matches your criteria. And then check if it falls under your price range. One tool may not offer all the things that you need. But, you have to see which features are most important and check if the tool satisfies them. I hope this post might have helped you in determining which tool best suits your needs.
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