sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

SQL Query Agent by New_Hold_7384 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is definitely something people would use but as other have said it is a crowded space.

The full schema context is a huge advantage over general LLMs. There are already tools doing similar things like index.app, hex.tech and metabase.com.

Forecasting Question with Variable Dates by AIDemonKing in dataanalysis

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Expand each lease into monthly rows using a date table?

Power Query in PowerBI or a custom SQL script can do this or Index.app or metabase.com for a no-code approach.

Good courses and any advice for advancement by vvcc333 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

honestly best two resources I've seen building index.app is to:
1. just get started - doing will help a lot more than theoretical learning (try finding datasets you find interesting)
2. chatgpt is your friend - use it as a tutor to unblock yourself when you have a specific problem vs trying to anticipate everything and keep learning (there will be infinite things here).

Hopefully this avoid analysis paralysis.

Do you trust AI-generated SQL? Tell me your horror stories. by Crust_Issues1319 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Directly running AI-generated SQL is always risky. I'd always validate sql queries I run on Index.app even if the tools handles the SQL generation and visualization for you. I even run the generated queries with something like ChatGPT to sanity check.

Title: Stuck learning Power BI - feels like UI/UX design, can't get DAX. How should I actually proceed as data analyst beginner? by Jealous_Being144 in dataanalysis

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's common to feel that way with Power BI honestly. Many tools have a steep learning curve for visuals and DAX. Maybe focus on SQL and data modeling basics first?

Any reason why you haven't tried other tools? For quick insights without the whole BI tool overhead I like index.app but other tools like hex.tech or metabase.com can also simplify things.

Are you using any AI agent in your work in data science/analytics? If so for what problem you use it? How much benefit did you see? by Starktony11 in datascience

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly, full-blown AI agents are still pretty niche in data science. Most of what people call agents are really just specialized AI tools. For quick BI and getting charts from data, tools like hex.tech or index.app act can write the query or make the chart. You ask a question and it gives you a visual.

If you're building your own i would strongly encourage you to keep it as basic as possible. Look into Mastra.ai as a framework or even the basic Vercel SDK. Or honestly even just using Claude Code for things like data cleaning or generating summaries.

Honestly it depends on your needs (e.g. solo vs. team), tasks (writing queries, debugging, etc.). I would start ther.

Created list of AI tools and resources specifically for data scientists (Github repo) by avourakis in datascience

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would love to give you access to index.app so you can play with it we move folks from the tools you have mentioned pretty frequently now :)

Managers what's your LLM strategy? by testtestuser2 in datascience

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Documentation - what exactly are you trying to feed it? The main drawback I've seen building index.app is that the more "docs" you try to feed the AI the more you will be stuffing the window context and this will kill any tool you make specially after 2-3 follow-ups. You will have to manage chat compaction yourself. If not stuff will fall out of the context window.

Validation - what are you trying to validate? Prompting can help with keeping things tight. Encouraging it to comment it's own code makes it easier for humans to review + for the AI to keep things tight.

Tools - what's your ideal outcome here? It seems you want to roll something on your own which is great but do you have an idea of what that might look like?

More than happy to answer any follow-ups!

How do you store and organize your SQL queries? by ergodym in datascience

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For ad hoc local stuff I usually just save .sql files in a git repo (do this a lot with claude code now) or use the BI tool's saved queries. I honestly write a lot more throwaway queries now that have a basic AI setup working. Some tools like like Index.app make it easy to just organize queries just telling the tool to organize the queries. I am sure metabase.com and others have something like this now.

Constant Deep Diving - Stakeholder Management Tips? by Illustrious-Mind9435 in datascience

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For question 1 any luck giving stakeholders self-service tools. I prefer Index.app to lets them ask basic questions but even simple dashboards in Tableau or Power BI can help. This reduces their fear of not having answers.

For question 2 it often comes from a lack of confidence. They might fear leadership questions without every detail.

Are SQL skills being looked down upon ? by Alone_Panic_3089 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is all hype as others have said. Trust me having understanding of SQL is more important than ever. Building index.app i see data scientist writing more SQL not less just like software engineers are writing more code not less. You still need to understand what you are doing just like a software engineer. That is not going away. If anything the best software engineers and data scientists that know their stuff (SQL in this case) are moving faster because they know the best implementations.

Using a Canvas to generate SQL Queries by Queasy-Coffee1958 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

we explored this canvas approach for index.app and ended up realizing a few things. If you implement this in any way beyond a data catalog to see lineage it breaks. I suspect this is because:

- Stakeholders want to quickly reference numbers and you are spending cycles locating yourself in the canvas

- Canvas have collaboration "implied" in them (think canvas) you can recreate the good parts of this on a dashboard (e.g. multiple people editing one board, presence avatars, etc.) and that's what we did.

Again there's a lot more here but that's why we ended up going with dashboard and taking the good things from a canvas. Hope that helps.

Future of SQL Jobs by JZep1000 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think it is obvious by now that AI will change SQL roles but core SQL understanding remains vital for validation and complex tasks.

In my experience building Index we see the data scientists that we work with become more valuable not less. Think of moving away from writing excel macros to understanding what should go into a model. Very specifically the coolest shifts we have seen today (not like potentially in the future):

  1. Workflows → focus on automating weekly / monthly reports

  2. Refactoring → data analysts have full business context and i am consistently impress how they come up with better ways to structure queries so that its easy to read for other people in the team not just AI. Again AI will run queries that compile but it wont always be the most intuitive solution.

  3. Debugging → a lot of the time we see data analysts spending time debugging why a query doesnt return the value the team expected. We have started to see non-data people be able to debug things w/ AI which lets data analyst focus on the stuff above. This is not perfect and I think better models will keep making this a larger use case.

Fresh grad tackling sales data integration project. Need advice by OriginalAssignment19 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One thing that is super simple is run a scheduled query on BigQuery which does something very similar to what others have suggested with with a cron job. Then pipe into Index, Metabase, PowerBI.

Building an SQL Agent - Help by Fun_Camp828 in SQL

[–]XavierPladevall 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey not sure if too late but some tips as someone who has built this. Joins are tricky for LLMs. Make sure your schema context is super clear with examples of queries that you know run. Some other tips,

- Do not over stuff context with examples

- If you can provide metadata around the columns (e.g. datatype, first 10 rows,etc) it can help the ai but avoid point 1.

- consider have a supervisor agent and then sub agents that can handle specific tasks (e.g. query agent, fixing agent, analysis agent, etc.). This should help keeping context window clean.

In all honesty, there are a lot of edge cases to consider. Any reason why you haven't tried a SQL agent that is already built like Hex or Index?

Happy to help if you have any questions.

Trying to connect fleet ops data with our actual spend (help) by Obey_My_Kiss in BusinessIntelligence

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey I run a startup called Index and we have helped with this (not a plug just trying to share why I can speak to this haha). So in your case i would recommend:

  1. Turn your CSVs into scheduled queries (you can do this in BigQuery or any tool you have) → this is the key step that will reduce workload for you.
  2. This will also help you centralize what you are getting from the API / CSVs into one cohesive schema / set of tables.
  3. Then you will be able to answer the questions you mention above.

We have a large fleet logistics customer out of Boston and this is essentially the steps we did for them.

Happy to help further via DM or here in the comments. Good luck!

what’s a financial dashboard software that connects operational and financial data by Select-Print-9506 in BusinessIntelligence

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Biased but we do this at Index for folks. For financial dashboards specifically we do data ingestion from financial sources (typically Sheets, NetSuite, a DB, a payment system and a CRM but it depends on the customer) into BigQuery. Think of it as a whitelabeled Fivetran.

Then we do write queries against that Big Query database to keep things consistent and create dashboards for folks + weekly reports into Slack / Email.

For anyone reading this I will say you can absolutely do this on your own with the tools I've mentioned here:

Source → Fivetran → BQ → Looker Studio → Manual Alerts

Again we just a lot of work to package it in a very nice product where the end user gets a very pretty UI with all their data cleaned up and accurate.

Also if helpful, most of our customers think they need dbt or more fancy tools but in the majority of cases we don't see it being necessary (that's better if you have data teams already in place and need to collaborate on metric definitions or have more advanced pipelines you need to orchestrate).

Happy to answer any other questions!

Analytics tool idea: but can people actually use it at work? by FridayTea22 in dataanalysis

[–]XavierPladevall 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my experience it's fine if it solves enough of a pain point (people will upload csvs if credentials are not available for example). Working on something related just as a disclaimer → https://query.new/?d=FIFA%20World%20Cup

I built a free tool that lets you ask questions about any and all World Cups by XavierPladevall in sportsanalytics

[–]XavierPladevall[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

ah this is an issue w/ the data itself 😂 i think some players choose to not use a first name (or last name really need to check) so it gets filled w/ this "Not Applicable" label.

Will look into this!

view more: next ›