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Usman Ashraf's avatar

Best line in here is the 'interns with database access' one.

From the trenches though, the part I keep getting stuck on is that a semantic layer assumes organizational consensus on what the semantics actually are. Most companies I work with, finance's 'revenue' and growth's 'revenue' just don't agree, and neither side wants to converge because each definition is propping up someone's quarterly KPIs. Auto-generating the model is the easy part. The hard part is who arbitrates when the model has to pick. Curious how Solid handles that. Is it one canonical definition wins, or multiple semantic views depending on the consumer?

Yoni Leitersdorf's avatar

Great question! So we do not actually try to solve that directly - each part of the business defines revenue differently, and that's OK. Instead, we capture the different definitions and associate them with the right models. When a question comes in, we know the context (marketing vs sales vs finance) and pick the revenue definition from the correct model.