Alteryx InboundNamedPipe::ReadFile: Not enough bytes read error – Postgres

Yet another strange day to be in. I kept getting the following error –

Error – The Designer x64 reported: InboundNamedPipe::ReadFile: Not enough bytes read. The pipe has been ended¶

I tried several methods – clearing of temp files, restarting alteryx, restarting my system multiple times, logging on and logging off etc to no avail. It just kept failing.

What added to the confusion is, it was happening only for few tables whose volumes are much smaller in size. I mean to say Table 1 with about ~20M records from the same database, we were able to extract successfully whereas from Table 2 with only ~3.5M we were facing this problem. Seemed really strange. The good old internet hadn’t turned up with anything useful and neither the Alteryx Forums. All the info that I got was that during one stage of workflow , it was running into error.

The case for me though is in my workflow apart from the ‘Input Tool’ from where I was pulling in the data and the ‘Output Tool’, there was nothing in between. Still it was failing.

Anyway I just took a break, thought for a while and said to myself – “When was the last time you had such strange error with Alteryx and Postgres combo?” Oh yeah, right here.

Hmm, why not try the same fix? I sure did and you know what! It just god darn works! Don’t even ask me how or why, it works. So gents and ladies, here is the fix you gotta do –

Go to the, Pre SQL Statement of your Alteryx ‘Input Tool’ and insert the following –

set client_encoding to ‘UTF-8’

As simple as that! Thank me later.

4 thoughts on “Alteryx InboundNamedPipe::ReadFile: Not enough bytes read error – Postgres

    • Hey Nipun, I haven’t had a chance to work with Mongo DB. The problem with these errors is they do not really reflect the actual problem. I would advice posting it to Alteryx forum.

  1. Just had the same error and it turned out to be a formula putting out a vwstring (from two numbers being divided mind you) and then trying to stuff the resulting string in a numeric column in the db. Terrible error message and also a terrible default behavior of the formula tool. Why in the world would you output a number divided by a number as a string by default?

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