Blog
Notes from the horizon
Engineering decisions, measurements that surprised us, and the things we got wrong and fixed.
-
Compare any period to the one before
Month over month, quarter over quarter, year over year. The most common question about any number is "compared to what?", and it should not need SQL or a calculator. Here is where it lives in the builder and how to read it.
product -
Ask your data a question, in your own words
Type the question the way you'd say it out loud, and get a query matched to the values that are really in your data. On our own machines, and only ever showing you what it can prove.
productai -
A blank canvas is a question
Our ingestor opened on an empty grid, which felt like freedom and was actually an interrogation. Fixing it meant admitting that every question we asked first was about our architecture, and none of them were about the customer.
engineeringproduct -
The reasons I gave myself were wrong
I spent years being sure about how analytics should scale. A database in a cluster, OLAP cubes, then a columnar engine. Every one of those certainties died against a measurement, including the ones I used to justify the migration I still think was right.
engineeringarchitecture -
SQL and notebooks, without a warehouse to run
The default stays no-SQL, for the people who have the question but not the query. But some of your team writes SQL, and lives in a notebook. So we added both, on rails: you write against your own tables, never our warehouse, and every query is cost-checked before it runs.
productsqlanalytics -
Security you can check, not just trust
Multi-tenant isolation is easy to claim and hard to prove. So we red-team our own, against the live system, and publish the result. Here's how your data stays yours, and where to check us.
securitytrust -
Turning events into decisions
Every team collects event data. Far fewer turn it into answers. Here's the gap we set out to close, and why we built the whole stack, not another dashboard.
analyticsproduct