Which database is best? The question, obviously, depends on what you want to use it for.

I, like most analysts, want to use a database to warehouse, process, and manipulate data—and there’s no shortage of thoughtful commentary outlining the types of databases I should prefer. But these evaluations, which typically discuss databases in terms of …

When we launched Mode’s public beta in June 2014, we knew we were putting an MVP (minimum viable product) editor into the wild. As soon as we released it, we started thinking about how we could make it even easier for analysts to create and share work. But, the beta gave us something we couldn’t get otherwise: usage data. By analyzing the way analysts have been using Mode, we’ve been able to validate some of our early feature…

Over the past year, as the head of analytics at a tech startup, I've had many conversations with analysts about what they want to learn from their data. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of companies have similar questions—What drives retention? How do customers interact with products? How do we better understand sales pipelines? What's the lifetime value of a user?

These questions were familiar to us and we'd worked on many of them ourselves. To find answers in our own data, we wrote…