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Column Naming Requirements

These requirements should be followed for column names in your datasets used in the Alteryx Analytics Cloud.

Note

In some cases, names that violate these requirements may be accepted by an individual application. However, these column names may be rejected by the underlying platform or running environment where the job is executed. For best results, you should follow these naming conventions.

  • Column names are case-insensitive and cannot begin with whitespace.

  • Column names cannot contain escaped characters, such as \n.

Note

When publishing to Avro,Parquet, or database tables, column names support alphanumeric characters and the underscore (_) character only. Column names cannot begin with a numeral. Other characters cause an error to occur.

Note

Column names with spaces or special characters in a transformation must be wrapped by curly braces. Example:

column1,{Column 2 with space},column3

Tip

To prevent potential issues with downstream systems, you should limit your column lengths to no more than 128 characters.

Reserved keywords

The following keywords should not be used as column names, as they may conflict with underlying requirements of the platform or the running environments with which it integrates:

Note

This list may not be complete. If your job fails with a duplicate column error, please review your column names to identify potential reserved keywords among them.

  • TRIFACTA__LINEAGE_INFO

  • TRIFACTA__FILE_LINEAGE_INFO

    Note

    There are two underscore characters in a row (__) after TRIFACTA in each of the above entries.

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