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Ask Collate

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What you can do

• Ask plain-language questions to discover tables, dashboards, owners, or usage patterns.
• Generate SQL with explanations you can review before running in your warehouse.
• Fix or optimize SQL by pasting an existing query and requesting improvements.
• Summarize metadata to understand table purpose, lineage, quality signals, and owners.
• Create and manage glossary terms, tags, and data quality tests through prompts.

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Prerequisites

• Collate AI is installed and enabled in your workspace.
• Metadata, lineage, and usage ingestion jobs are running so Ask Collate has context.
• You have permissions to view and act on the assets you are asking about.

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How to use

1. Click the Ask Collate chat icon in the Collate UI.
2. Enter your question in plain language; no SQL is required to start.
3. Use follow-up prompts to refine the answer, adjust filters, or change the visualization.
4. Review the generated SQL or insights, then run or apply them in your preferred workflow.

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Core Capabilities

• Discover: Search certified datasets, BI assets, and databases with metadata filters.
• Analyze: Translate business questions into executable SQL for warehouses like Snowflake or Redshift.
• Visualize: Create charts (bar, pie, donut, etc.) and refine them with follow-up prompts.
• Test: Detect anomalies and suggest data quality tests using profiling and lineage context.
• Lineage: Visualize upstream and downstream dependencies to perform impact analysis.
• Govern: Create or edit glossary terms, assign owners, and tag assets from the chat.

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Reliable Prompt Patterns

• “Show me top marketing tables by usage this month. Only certified assets.”
• “What does the orders table store and who owns it?”
• “Write a query for the last 90 days of active users by region.”
• “Here is my query. Can you make it faster and explain the changes?”
• “Which Tier 1 assets are missing descriptions?”
• “Show lineage for customer_360 and highlight downstream dashboards.”

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Use cases

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Data analyst: assess eco-friendly product performance

• Prompt: “Give me total market share for eco vs non-eco products by revenue. Only Tier 1 data.”
• Result: Finds certified Snowflake tables (products, orders, customers), generates SQL, and returns the split with a chart.
• Follow-up: “Use a donut chart with dark green for eco.” Ask Collate updates the styling and summary.

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Data analyst: customer segmentation

• Prompt: “What percent of customers bought eco products, grouped by customer tier?”
• Result: Produces SQL, groups by tier, and surfaces the insight that higher-tier customers engage more with eco products.

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Data analyst: product-level checks

• Prompt: “List eco-friendly products with total revenue.”
• Result: Returns a ranked list and flags anomalies (for example, a product with unexpected zero revenue) for follow-up with engineering.

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Data engineer: troubleshoot data quality

• Prompt: “Show lineage for the customer report dashboard.”
• Result: Maps upstream tables (including customer_360) and downstream impacts.
• Prompt: “Search for anomalies in these tables: nulls, negatives, duplicates.”
• Result: Surfaces outliers (for example, negative unit_price values).
• Prompt: “Create test cases for the products table.”
• Result: Suggests completeness, uniqueness, range, and integrity tests and records who requested them.

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Data steward: glossary and tagging

• Prompt: “Do we have a definition for revenue?”
• Result: Searches glossary terms and suggests creating one if missing.
• Prompt: “Create a term for revenue calculation and tag relevant Snowflake tables.”
• Result: Adds the term, links it to assets such as order_items, and tracks ownership.

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Best practices

• Be specific with filters (time ranges, owners, schemas) to narrow results.
• Paste failing SQL when asking for fixes and include error context if available.
• Review the explanation that accompanies generated SQL to confirm intent.
• Use follow-up prompts to iterate instead of starting new threads.

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Troubleshooting

• If answers seem incomplete, verify recent metadata and lineage ingestion runs succeeded.
• If you cannot see certain assets, confirm your Collate permissions for those services.
• For inconsistent results, restate the question with the relevant schema or service name.