A Common Engineering Problem
Maybe you’ve been there: you find yourself given access to a giant, half-documented store of data, and you’re not entirely sure what you even have. Even worse, maybe you’ve never seen most of it before! Your unfortunate task is to find the needle in the haystack on a tight deadline. Connections are fragile, and you can’t risk altering any of the data, but you need answers fast. Where do you begin, and what can you realistically hope to achieve?
A tough situation to be sure, but one that is fairly common. Here at Clear Fracture we found ourselves running into this too. That’s why we developed Investigate, a new feature available in Belvedere. Investigate is a read-only research agent that answers questions about your data, grounded in your catalog.
How Investigate Can Help
To start digging into a task like this one, normally you at least need to have an idea of what databases and tables might be available, along with their schemas. Lineage is likely to play a role too, so that you can understand both upstream and downstream data flows around a particular asset.
With Investigate, you have the luxury of letting an agent figure those things out and document them for you. Instead of starting with SQL queries, you start with plain English: