Once a model is in SqlDBM, Copilot can answer questions about it in plain English. This article covers how to ask questions about a specific object, how to scope Copilot’s context to what you want to know about, and what kinds of questions are a good fit for Copilot versus the Database Documentation screen or the Search bar.
Who this is for: Analysts, data consumers, engineers, and anyone who needs to understand a model someone else built. You don’t need to be a modeler to use this capability. Read-only access to the project is enough to ask questions.
Two ways to ask a question
Copilot offers two entry points depending on whether your question is about a specific object or about the project as a whole:
Object-scoped questions. Hover over any table, view, or column in the diagram. A small Copilot icon appears next to the object name. Click it to open a scoped Copilot conversation where every response is grounded in that specific object and its immediate relationships.
Project-wide questions. Open the Copilot panel from the left-hand navigation. Ask anything about the full project — cross-table relationships, where a field is used, which tables contain PII, what the overall shape of the model looks like.
What kinds of questions work well
Copilot is strong at questions that require synthesizing across multiple objects or reading metadata you haven’t pre-indexed. Good examples:
- Explain what this table represents in business terms.
- Where is customer_id used across the model?
- What tables would be affected if I dropped this column?
- Summarize the overall shape of this model. What domains does it cover?
- Which tables look like they store PII?
- How is this report table populated? Trace the data lineage from source to destination.
- Create a dimensional table for orders based on the existing schema.
Copilot is less useful for questions that have a single deterministic answer Search can give you faster:
- Does column X exist? (use the Search bar.)
- What’s the data type of column X? (open the Database Documentation screen.)
- Show me every table in this schema. (expand the Database Explorer on the left.)
Asking about objects semantically, not just by name
Copilot understands field meaning beyond exact spelling. If you ask “which columns contain personally identifiable information,” Copilot will surface customer_name, user_email, person_id, ssn, and similar fields regardless of naming convention or casing. The same applies to questions like “which tables look like dimensions” or “which fields store monetary values." Copilot reads context, not just strings.
Limitations you should know about
- Current project only. Copilot’s context is scoped to the project you’re working in. It cannot see tables in other projects today. Cross-project awareness is planned for a future release.
- Metadata, not live data. Copilot reads the schema inside SqlDBM: table definitions, descriptions, relationships, governance flags. It does not run queries against your Snowflake or Databricks database, and it cannot tell you what row-level data is in a table.
- Very large models. If your project has thousands of tables, Copilot fetches the most relevant portion for each question rather than the whole model at once. If an answer seems incomplete, ask a more scoped follow-up question to narrow the focus.
- Chat history resets when you navigate away. When you click off the diagram to another screen, the Copilot panel resets. If you need to keep a conversation, minimize the panel rather than navigating away, or save important responses externally.
When to use Copilot instead of other tools
Use Copilot when: the question requires reasoning across multiple objects, or when you don’t know the exact name of the thing you’re looking for, or when you want an explanation rather than a lookup.
Use Search when: you know the exact or partial name of the object.
Use Database Documentation when: you want to see or edit metadata properties (descriptions, data types, logical names) on a single object.
Related articles
- Getting started with Copilot
- Bulk governance actions
- Database Documentation
- Configuring Copilot settings and pre-prompts