Clay: Faster and Easier Lookup Row Action - Check out the Exciting Changes!

Yash T. · 2024-02-14 15:58:07.314231+00

- quick :mega: mini-announcement: we’ve made some new changes to the `Lookup Row` action in Clay! two important things: 1. Speed in large tables should be 3x faster. No more waiting on data to come in from other tables :muscle::skin-tone-4: 2. It’s now _way_ easier to extract data from your lookups (see the before and after in the screenshots below) :mag: s/o to for these big Quality of Improvements to a critical Clay feature!

Clay: Faster and Easier Lookup Row Action - Check out the Exciting Changes! | Clay

Jamie M.
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hey Yash, we actually noticed a problem with this. When we did it before it would lookup another table and then return all the rows as an array. Now it only returns 1 record vs all. Is this intended? (check help for the thread)
Joe R.
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Thank you Eric E. - not having to type out key?.value is huge in terms of legibility
Khaydien A.
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so we cannot return more than one record anymore? this solves speed but what if we want to return multiple records as an array?
Eric E.
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Hey Jamie M. Khaydien A. — What’s the use-case here for needing multiple records. I’m happy to do some re-arranging here, but the reason that we made this switch is two fold:
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Speed - things are much faster when you don’t need to check the entire table
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The main use-case we found was: If this row already exists, get the information but don’t re-enrich it.
How are you using the multiple results? Is it for the count of rows purposes or something else?
Jamie M.
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Hey Eric E. Use case: Domain lookup vs email lookup. If you search for a domain in another table, there could be multilpe records we want to return. I.e. John @ Nike and Sarah @ Nike Lookup under nike.com = 2 records in an array
Jamie M.
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this update prevents this from working, as rather than return 2 records, it returns only john @ nike
Eric E.
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Jamie M. do you then send these rows to a write to table, or do you use formulas to combine them etc?
Jamie M.
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so a use case for us would be something like: Import domains - Enrich domains - Find people for DM's (Thats now another table) Then lookup in other table the domain. Return all DM's, score the DM's based on relevancy. Then pick best DM to email
Jamie M.
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hope that makes sense?
Jamie M.
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It's kinda the backbone of our flow to leverage a waterfall method + findpeople
Eric E.
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Thanks Jamie M. — I’ll work on some updates here to allow for this. I’ll probably divide the integrations to still allow for some speed updates — I’ll keep you posted by end of day
Jamie M.
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thank you - yeah agreed, the update seems great for doing a single row lookup. but destroys array lookup. IMO it could be 2 different features (lookup in table vs lookup row). 1 = faster and good for the email use-case. 1 = More sophistiacted and better for a lot more use-cases
Eric E.
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Hey Jamie M. Khaydien A. — Feedback received. I just released a new update. I:
Reverted the single row limit of the old action to restore your old workflows
Split the new actions into two: lookup row and lookup multiple rows
The new multiple action also has the new key:value response structure
All three actions will be faster, but single row will be the fastest by far. I appreciate everyone’s feedback here, and apologies for breaking your workflows. Happy lookups 🙂
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Yash T.
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Eric E. is the best 👍🏽❤️
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Khaydien A.
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Amazing! Thank you so much Eric!

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