Clarisights Journal

What to ask the new guy (as written by the new guy)

What to ask the new guy (as written by the new guy)

Since I'm the new guy and hired as a senior engineer, I get asked quite a lot about what I see and if there are things we are doing wrong. People are a bit bemused when I tell them that everything has been great so far. I do understand why

Meet The Team #2: Lakshmi Prasanna (& New Beginnings 🌱)

Meet The Team #2: Lakshmi Prasanna (& New Beginnings 🌱)

Customer Success is one of the most important functions at Clarisights. Our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) serve as the nerve centre for the entire company; all other functions rely on our CSMs because they are the first to know if other functions are delivering. CSMs write product requirement documents (PRDs)

The Purist and the Pragmatist: An Oral History of MorselDB (Part 2)

The Purist and the Pragmatist: An Oral History of MorselDB (Part 2)

Clarisights empowers performance marketing teams at some of the world’s most innovative companies to take meaningful decisions. We do this by democratising data through our revolutionary no-code BI reporting platform. Sitting at the heart of the Clarisights platform is MorselDB. MorselDB is the proprietary database technology that enables our

Meet The Team #1: Ashu Pachauri (& The power of focussing on the fundamentals)

Meet The Team #1: Ashu Pachauri (& The power of focussing on the fundamentals)

Welcome to the first edition of Meet The Team, a series of short, intimate conversations with the people at Clarisights. In this installment, we speak with Ashu Pachauri, our CTO. Clarisights Journal: Ashu welcome to the first installment of Meet The Team. What do you do at Clarisights, Ashu? Ashu:

Buy or Build?: An Oral History of MorselDB (Part 1)

Engineering Featured

Buy or Build?: An Oral History of MorselDB (Part 1)

In this series of posts, the team at Clarisights tells you the story behind the making of Morsel DB and how it will power the next generation of Clarisights customers.

Clarisights raises $14M Series A led by Sequoia Capital India

Clarisights raises $14M Series A led by Sequoia Capital India

Modern business teams need a self-service data workspace. All BI projects start with a simple goal — provide scalable, reliable dashboards for the business teams so that you don't have business teams sharing clunky, manually built spreadsheets floating around, which are hard to QA and maintain. Yet six months after every

Exercising validations to keep grounded - a philosophic undertaking (on the power of empathy and validation in design)

Exercising validations to keep grounded - a philosophic undertaking (on the power of empathy and validation in design)

Opinions have the power to change the course of history. They help people, and very well hurt them too. Personal beliefs engine opinions as there is no pre-requisite for the base facts or knowledge behind those beliefs. So, everybody’s got one of these. Thoughts run; opinions pop. And that’

Scaling Backend 100x

Scaling Backend 100x

The post will show how we scaled a lot of our time-consuming background jobs by 100X and more. Obviously, 100X is relative to where we were before. Our previous post covered some of the optimizations we did earlier and how the setup looks like. For sake of brevity, we won’

Resolving metric dependency & expression with DAG & AST

Resolving metric dependency & expression with DAG & AST

At Clarisights, we are building an automated BI platform for enterprise performance marketing teams. Our goal is to help non-SQL literate business users to ask questions about their data at the deepest granularity without worrying about pipelines, data de-normalization or writing complex queries. We enable customers to create “custom metrics”

What it's like to work at Clarisights?

What it's like to work at Clarisights?

March is almost here and 2019 is already two months old. How were your first couple of months in this new year, guys? I’m currently in Bengaluru and recently started working with the Growth team at Clarisights. It has been an exciting month of learning, new experiences, and meeting

Our New Identity - Clarisights

Our New Identity - Clarisights

We have all been there. You stay up all night preparing the presentation for your monthly marketing review and you show up thinking you have every question covered, until that one person in the meeting who asks a seemingly innocuous question that has you dumbfounded like “What were the best

The journey of Custom Metrics at Clarisights

The journey of Custom Metrics at Clarisights

This article is about how a simple feature spanned its journey to become one of the most used and also complex features of Clarisights. Custom metrics, as the name implies, allows marketers to create their own metrics on Clarisights. For example, to compute the average cost of acquiring a customer,

Monitoring and Reporting Errors from Sidekiq Jobs

Monitoring and Reporting Errors from Sidekiq Jobs

Sidekiq is famous (in the Ruby world) as an easy and simple background job processing solution. Sidekiq covers almost all the use cases that you expect from a background job processing solution but sometimes you need something that is not supported out of the box. That’s when Sidekiq middleware

Ruby Hotspots: Finding avenues for Memoization and Caching

Ruby Hotspots: Finding avenues for Memoization and Caching

Like most fast growing startups building the next generation technical platform, we, at Clarisights engineering, are always trying to balance the speed with which we push out new features and finding ways for the performance of the system to keep pace with this speed. There are standard established techniques for

Postgresql — mysterious bad connections issue post Rails 5.2

Postgresql — mysterious bad connections issue post Rails 5.2

The Problem We have a Rails backend and use Postgresql as our OLTP DB. About a month back, we moved to Rails 5.2. Ever since we noticed that our queries to PG in our background jobs will randomly fail. Errors would look like PG::ConnectionBad: PQconsumeInput(). These errors, in

Data Gravity — Why Should Marketers Care?

Data Gravity — Why Should Marketers Care?

Dave McCrory first introduced the concept of Data Gravity back in 2010, referring to Salesforce’s Database.com launch. The big idea of data gravity in his own words is — As data accumulates (builds mass) there is a greater likelihood that additional services and applications will be attracted to this

The Showdown: Tableau v/s Google Data Studio for Marketers

The Showdown: Tableau v/s Google Data Studio for Marketers

To keep things contextual, I will stay focused on marketers in this post. However, many of the points discussed here are applicable to broader users of the products discussed. Until Google introduced the Data Studio beta in 2016, most marketers relied on one of two options for reporting. The first

The Inflection Point for BI Platforms

Product Featured

The Inflection Point for BI Platforms

The recent story from WSJ on Finance Chiefs asking their teams to move away from Excel generated a lot of buzz with folks debating the article with a lot of passion on Twitter and other channels, so much so that WSJ had to publish a follow-up to the article presenting

How we scaled our Rails backend?

How we scaled our Rails backend?

In today’s post, I will cover what all we did to optimize to our backend system which is a Ruby on Rails application. Background AdWyze (now Clarisights) uses Ruby on Rails and as a data integration platform and we talk to multiple external sources. In fact, we keep fetching