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Show HN: Strata – an expressive semantic layer that can say no to your LLM

23 pointsposted 2 days ago

15 Comments

efromvt

2 days ago

I’m a big fan of the strict naming as an abstraction above tables and reuse as blend key approach, it also greatly simplifies aggregate resolution like you have. (Landed on the same abstraction level when building a semantic model personally).

Lots of 404s on the docs pages - might be worth an audit of links?

ajoski9

a day ago

Thanks for the heads up. I do have a specific question on your implementation. We were thinking about launching a semantic layer as a service api. You post your model and we give you fast query generation. You can then use this in your own tools. Benefits are a fast expressive semantic layer, model hosted, and your actual data stays behind your firewall. What do you think of this?

chrisweekly

2 days ago

> "Not a fit? That is fair. If all you want is another query tool for SQL-fluent analysts, Strata is not it. We are built to take powerful self-service to everyone else, the people who could never write the query in the first place."

Every product should include this kind of disclaimer. Clarity on what it's NOT is often more immediately illuminating than (usually more verbose) descriptions of what it IS.

Anyway, this looks like it could be useful - though I'd find it much more compelling if it were OSS.

ajoski9

a day ago

Thanks for the comment. We are highly focused on certain use cases and want to be upfront about that.

elzbardico

2 days ago

The free tier is up to 25 users. Spend some tokens to replicate it and publish it as Open Source.

ajoski9

a day ago

ah man, that's not cool

elzbardico

a day ago

I know, I won't do it, but someone will.

irasigman

2 days ago

How do you weight the value of semantic layers when all of the labs are chasing shell usage benchmarks like TerminalBench?

Aside from the enterprise stuff like consistent metrics I’m not convinced semantic layers improve agent performance. Case in point is Snowflake Analyst has been routing 90%+ of queries to traditional SQL as opposed to their own semantic SQL dialect.

A semantic layer is a concept from 2018 in the BI world. Metadata is one thing but semantic layer implies an abstraction from physical data with lossy translations.

ajoski9

a day ago

Great question. Semantic layer has been around before I was even in the industry. Probably late 90's. Innovation on this layer has gone backwards actually. Simpler and less capable (Looker vs Strategy for example).

It does however improve on agent performance in one important way: rejects plausible queries that are invalid. Agents writing sql are more likely to be inventive in unexpected ways. Business users won't know the difference. It is definitely not useful for developers/data engineers anymore. But quite a good tool as part of analytics harness for business users.

The one issue with Snowflake semantic dialect is the lack of expressiveness. Agents have to route to sql for many common scenarios. What do you think?

lubujackson

2 days ago

[flagged]

dang

2 days ago

Can you please edit out swipes, especially when discussing someone's work? You broke both HN's rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and the Show HN rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html), and your comment would be fine without that bit.

You could make an even more helpful comment by explaining what would make the landing page better, but at a minimum, please avoid pejoratives and putdowns.

isomorphic

2 days ago

Go up a level in the URL, or click on the logo in the upper-left on the "try" page the post links to.

https://strata.do/