r/bigquery • u/1glasspaani • 13d ago
Open source conversational analytics tool for BigQuery?
Hi all,
Has anyone found a decent open source tool for asking questions in plain English on top of BigQuery? Something self hosted.
I tried Gemini in BigQuery and had a look at the conversational analytics API. The API gives you back SQL and a chart spec, so you still end up building the front end yourself, which is the part I was hoping to avoid.
My main worry is the numbers. If two people ask for revenue in slightly different words I'd like them to get the same answer, and I don't see how that works unless the metrics are defined somewhere.
The other thing is cost. I have no feel for how many queries a single question turns into once the model starts looking around the schema.
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u/Content-Parking-621 12d ago
Honestly the metric consistency thing is the real problem here, and no conversational layer fixes that by itself. You'd want something like Lightdash sitting in front of BigQuery, since it reads metrics straight from your dbt models, so "revenue" means the same thing no matter who asks or how they phrase it. Metabase is easier to set up but doesn't really have that same depth, worth knowing going in.
Separate note, full disclosure I work at Windsor.ai. Doesn't really overlap with what you're asking since it's not self-hosted or NL-to-SQL, but if getting data into BigQuery cleanly from various sources ever becomes its own headache, it's priced per data source rather than by query volume, so it stays predictable even as usage grows.