Post by Rajagopal Senthil Kumar

Will SQL become optional for business users? That’s the question I kept thinking about while exploring Databricks Genie. For years, the typical analytics journey looked like this: Business User → Raise Request → Data Team → SQL Development → Dashboard → Insight Sometimes that cycle takes days. Sometimes weeks. But what happens when business users can directly ask: “Which campaign generated the highest ROI this month?” “Show me the top creators by engagement rate.” “Why did revenue drop compared to last month?” And receive a table, chart, dashboard, and even the generated SQL within seconds? At first glance, Genie looks like a chatbot. But after spending time studying the architecture, I realized that Genie is actually a metadata-driven analytics engine. The quality of its answers depends less on AI and more on how well we prepare our data platform. Genie becomes powerful when we teach it: • Table relationships and cardinality • Business metrics and KPIs • Column descriptions • Business definitions • Example benchmark questions • Trusted governed data in Unity Catalog This means the role of a Data Engineer is evolving. Instead of only building pipelines, we now need to build data products that AI can understand. One observation stood out during my research: Genie does not learn from the actual data rows. It learns from the context we provide around the data. Poor metadata → Poor answers. Strong metadata → Business-ready insights. In the attached infographic, I walk through: • End-to-end Genie architecture • Loading data from Delta tables and S3 sources • Teaching Genie relationships and business rules • Creating Genie Spaces • Natural language to SQL generation • Dashboard creation workflow • What Genie actually requires to deliver accurate answers The interesting question is no longer: “Can AI generate SQL?” The more important question is: “Have we prepared our data platform well enough for AI to understand our business?” References: Databricks Genie Overview https://lnkd.in/gcrQsfxG Talk to Genie https://lnkd.in/gEhRiBuk Create and Configure Genie Spaces https://lnkd.in/gSHiRwky Unity Catalog https://lnkd.in/g_W3Me6B Databricks SQL Warehouse https://lnkd.in/gmB2Efn6 What has been your biggest challenge when enabling self-service analytics for business users? #Databricks #Genie #AI #DataEngineering #Analytics #BusinessIntelligence #DataGovernance #UnityCatalog #Lakehouse #DatabricksSQL #DataArchitecture #GenerativeAI #SelfServiceAnalytics #SENDAKIL