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Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

patterns.app

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Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#181
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad i'm not the only one who saw this. Feels extremely overblown. Very impressive, don't get me wrong, and is yet another bridge closer to letting business side do plain text queries. But that said, stuff like this has existed for awhile, and it's certainly not replacing analysts. For a start, this assumes a VERY clean model, which is of course what you strive for, but the moment you step out of FAANG you'll find th…

>the moment you step out of FAANG Even in FAANG, most data is going to be extremely messy. * There's usually very little incentive for good documentation, so you have to guess what the table contains based on column names and exploring patterns in the data. * Enforcing a single pattern/process for data across the entire org is a pipe dream. * Logging tables are written to by hundreds of engineers across dozens of tea…

Can't say speak for FAANG, but can confirm for a $100B+ business that analytics was a huge mess. There was constant investment on both the engineering and analytics functions to wrangle a coherent view on top of the underlying operational data model.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#184

Hmmm... I'm surprised I'm not seeing anyone else question the validity of this taking "2 hours" Given that it's written on the blog for the product it's using, this reads to me a lot like a pure sales pitch. They want us to believe if you use Patterns (which is neat), your company will be much more cost-effective. I'm not saying that's bad - that's probably the right thing to do with their company blog, and it's cool…

I love the time estimates. 2 hours after spending 3 weeks figuring out how to get everything playing nicely together.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#185

You didn't replace a SQL Analyst, you just gave them a query generator. End data consumers don't understand the data model, assumptions, quirks, etc. If they fire the analyst, they are going to wind up drawing a lot of bad conclusions on anything more complicated than simple aggregations.

You can easily add more components to start thinking about models/assumptions/etc, like adding interfaces to Data Catalogs (i.e. Glue Data Catalog). As part of a POC I made, I built a similar bot without recursion for debugging and iterative query building though. It does the following: - It predicts most probable entities from the question. - Searches AWS Glue Data Catalog for the most probable/useful tables. - It b…

Thats not really fair to the human. The time to learn basic SQL may be longer, but the algorithm will never develop intuition or independence, while many junior analysts will eventually operate effectively on their own.

It’s a neat tool for analysts as a query generator - I would use it in situations where I’m not familiar with the schema, but it would become less useful as I learn.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#186

You didn't replace a SQL Analyst, you just gave them a query generator. End data consumers don't understand the data model, assumptions, quirks, etc. If they fire the analyst, they are going to wind up drawing a lot of bad conclusions on anything more complicated than simple aggregations.

But it does lower the bar for asking questions a lot. Before you ask a human you have to do a sanity check. Most obvious is asking the same as last week but it could also be something readily available elsewhere.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily add more components to start thinking about models/assumptions/etc, like adding interfaces to Data Catalogs (i.e. Glue Data Catalog). As part of a POC I made, I built a similar bot without recursion for debugging and iterative query building though. It does the following: - It predicts most probable entities from the question. - Searches AWS Glue Data Catalog for the most probable/useful tables. - It b…

Thats not really fair to the human. The time to learn basic SQL may be longer, but the algorithm will never develop intuition or independence, while many junior analysts will eventually operate effectively on their own. It’s a neat tool for analysts as a query generator - I would use it in situations where I’m not familiar with the schema, but it would become less useful as I learn.

Yeah, maybe I should've said "first-weeks/months" level junior data analyst.

But hell, as an analyst I would've paid a lot for a tool that searched intelligently through giant datawarehouses (or whatever consultants call them now) and at least gave you probable matches.

Now that same thing exists and you can even finetune its "DSL" towards your own organization.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#188
post #52

> this is shockingly close to replacing an entire role at companies with only a couple hours of effort. and > It seems like there’s almost no limit to how good GPT could get at this. I don't see how that's a valid conclusion given the results. 2 simple things right, moderate to difficult things wrong? Hardly a ringing endorsement.

I came here to say the same! I was “shockingly close” to winning the lottery last week… …the guy who lives next door won.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#189

Side/meta-question: Do you all think that GPT and such will see a pattern of usefulness starting with: 1) blatantly wrong but helping to train/give examples to the most rudimentary and beginning stages of people learning a task? (since that's what it's doing at the same time?) I.e. replacing low-skilled intro training, or more charitably, helping to make it possible for far more people to learn something with assista…

Meta-Meta question: Why is "actually worrisome" part of "more capable"? If worrisome is because of job prospects for an existing career, my advice is to embrace new tech, not fear it. Just keeping up with things even if you don't use it right away is usually enough to stay relevant. Things don't really evolve that quickly, and so as long as you don't resist change completely things usually work out. Heck even if you…

Right, well I just use it as a phrase, to shorthand mean, "wow, really pay attention to as changing how we work and behave".

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#190

Hmmm... I'm surprised I'm not seeing anyone else question the validity of this taking "2 hours" Given that it's written on the blog for the product it's using, this reads to me a lot like a pure sales pitch. They want us to believe if you use Patterns (which is neat), your company will be much more cost-effective. I'm not saying that's bad - that's probably the right thing to do with their company blog, and it's cool…

> if you use Patterns (which is neat)

Wasn't sure of their proposition/hadn't heard of them.

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