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Ask Collate

Ask Collate is the AI assistant inside Collate. It lets you explore data assets, generate and run SQL queries, visualize insights, and enforce governance using natural language based on Collate’s Unified Knowledge Graph. Moreover, AskCollate runs with the permissions granted to the user, ensuring compliance with every performed action.

What you can do

  • Navigate your data with plain-language and understand what’s the best asset to handle your use case.
  • Run SQL queries, discover insights and visualize results.
  • Dive deep into assets’ lineage and health.
  • Understand your company’s language with the glossary, create new terms, and apply metadata changes.

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.

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.

Use cases

Let’s imagine a company trying to assess sales for a new product launched to the market. Different personas will have different needs and goals, and they all can use AskCollate to help get their job done for this project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.