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Just to throw it out there, an alternative approach is to have the AI talk to a semantic layer. There are pros and cons to this and in practice you'd probably w

Just to throw it out there, an alternative approach is to have the AI talk to a semantic layer. There are pros and cons to this and in practice you'd probably want an agent that can intelligently decide whether to call your semantic layer or go through some other process that may involve multiple queries, function calls, etc. IMO a semantic layer makes it so easy to query that natural language querying is often not beneficial, even for business users. I take a hybrid approach of the semantic layer solving >95% of use cases and custom SQL as needed in backend processing. https://github.com/totalhack/zillion https://github.com/totalhack/zillion

mritchie712 3y ago
I like the concept of a semantic layer, but I haven't seen strong adoption of any of them (outside of LookML within Looker). Most of the companies I've talked to that are heavy dbt users don't use their semantic layer, but maybe that will change as the products mature!
- lmeyerov 3y ago
  We are seeing similar for Louie.ai . Data catalog yes, semantic no. We are also doing a lot of non-SQL like logs DBs (SIEMs) and graph DBs, which adds even more fun to that kind of question. My hypothesis here is that "semantic layer is to semantic web as LLM + vector search over activity is to Google/pagerank": easier to let the machines figure it out. We use knowledge graphs in some of our work, so definitely not disputing the value when people do put in the effort. Wrt llmindex, the new tools like vector dbs & llmindex have been interesting. Fine-ish for our self-hosted, but most start getting tricky when a multi-tenant SaaS where we lower costs for teams and users by sharing infra yet need sharing boundaries.
PerihelionCT 3y ago
I'm working on something that I believe has a similar to approach to what you're describing, particularly with the use of the semantic layer that AI talks to. Would love to connect sometime if you're open to trading notes? See profile for contact info, thx!

mritchie712 3y ago

I like the concept of a semantic layer, but I haven't seen strong adoption of any of them (outside of LookML within Looker). Most of the companies I've talked to that are heavy dbt users don't use their semantic layer, but maybe that will change as the products mature!

lmeyerov 3y ago
We are seeing similar for Louie.ai . Data catalog yes, semantic no. We are also doing a lot of non-SQL like logs DBs (SIEMs) and graph DBs, which adds even more fun to that kind of question. My hypothesis here is that "semantic layer is to semantic web as LLM + vector search over activity is to Google/pagerank": easier to let the machines figure it out. We use knowledge graphs in some of our work, so definitely not disputing the value when people do put in the effort. Wrt llmindex, the new tools like vector dbs & llmindex have been interesting. Fine-ish for our self-hosted, but most start getting tricky when a multi-tenant SaaS where we lower costs for teams and users by sharing infra yet need sharing boundaries.

PerihelionCT 3y ago

I'm working on something that I believe has a similar to approach to what you're describing, particularly with the use of the semantic layer that AI talks to. Would love to connect sometime if you're open to trading notes? See profile for contact info, thx!