Great question. Semantic layer has been around before I was even in the industry. Probably late 90's. Innovation on this layer has gone backwards actually. Simpler and less capable (Looker vs Strategy for example).
It does however improve on agent performance in one important way: rejects plausible queries that are invalid. Agents writing sql are more likely to be inventive in unexpected ways. Business users won't know the difference. It is definitely not useful for developers/data engineers anymore. But quite a good tool as part of analytics harness for business users.
The one issue with Snowflake semantic dialect is the lack of expressiveness. Agents have to route to sql for many common scenarios. What do you think?
It does however improve on agent performance in one important way: rejects plausible queries that are invalid. Agents writing sql are more likely to be inventive in unexpected ways. Business users won't know the difference. It is definitely not useful for developers/data engineers anymore. But quite a good tool as part of analytics harness for business users.
The one issue with Snowflake semantic dialect is the lack of expressiveness. Agents have to route to sql for many common scenarios. What do you think?