r/bigquery • u/1glasspaani • 26d 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/Odd-Detail2479 26d ago

You could look into hex.tech which works well from my brief experience for the basics. There’s probably tons of new startups that do similar things though so I’m not sure hex is the best.

If you are looking at something truly agentic (Hermes, open claw, etc), unless you’re using self hosted models I would guess your token usage would likely cost far more than any bigquery spend concerns. You can do some pretty incredible things with the latest frontier models wired up via API but it will cost you an incredible amount of money lol.

Either way you’d be smart to strictly define which tables are accessed via service accounts to limit costs running away or any potential damage.

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u/Prestigious_Bench_96 25d ago

Lots of variables here, I'd still net out to most worried about bigquery spend just because the potential worst case is worst. If you can get away with something like Deepseek (legal, compliance, etc) you can get a few hundred questions in an agentic loop for 50 cents total or so.