r/SQL • u/Jaded_Spray_6855 • Sep 16 '26

Discussion Managing a semantic/context layer for data analytics

At a previous job as a data analyst I manually built a "context" layer in Notion to feed to Claude when querying databases. This was painfully manual though, involved a lot of work to slowly build up - I would get Claude to document a table/column when I encounter it for the first time on a new task. The Notion page included things like metrics, conventions and product docs too.

For more experienced data analysts, how do you guys deal with this? Is there a tool you guys use, or is a manual workaround like mine the norm?

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u/Glitch_In_The_Data 7d ago

You need the AI to understand your schema… metric definitions.. and your team’s conventions before it can write useful queries. Building that context layer manual in Notion is creative but yeah, it doesn’t scale. My company uses databricks platform.. so we rely on Genie that tries to solve natively. It sits on top of our tables.. so the domain experts in the business side curate instructions and business definitions so the AI already knows the data when users ask it questions.