This article introduces SqlDBM AI Copilot; what it does, where it lives in the interface, and how to run your first prompt. Read this first before moving on to the detailed articles on reverse engineering, talking to your model, bulk governance, and admin configuration.
In this article: Copilot is currently available in beta for logical and physical projects on eligible plans. An account administrator must enable Copilot before it appears in a user’s workspace. If you don’t see the Copilot icon described below, contact your administrator or see “Enabling Copilot for your account and users.”
What Copilot does
Copilot is an AI assistant built into SqlDBM. It grounds every response in your project’s schema, governance standards, and pre-prompts, which means it answers questions about the model you’re actually working in, not about data modeling in general. Copilot covers five capability areas today:
- Reverse engineering from anything. Upload a PDF, Word document, Excel or CSV file, DDL script, image of an ERD, or paste requirements directly, and Copilot generates tables, columns, and relationships in your project.
- Talk to your model. Ask natural-language questions about any object; what it means, how it relates to other tables, where a field is used, what changing it would affect.
- Bulk governance. Apply naming conventions, flag PII, generate descriptions, and tag objects across hundreds of tables with a single prompt.
- Role-based responses. Tell Copilot whether you’re working as a data architect, engineer, governance lead, or consumer, and responses are calibrated to that context.
- Pre-prompts. Teach Copilot your organization’s standards once, and they apply to every interaction from every team member in that project.
Where to find Copilot
Copilot appears in two places inside a project:
- The Copilot panel: a chat-style sidebar you can open from the left-hand navigation. Use this for free-form prompts, project-wide questions, and bulk changes.
- The Copilot icon on objects: hover over any table, view, or column in the diagram and a small Copilot icon appears. Click it to ask a scoped question about that specific object.
In the Reverse Engineering screen, you will also see a Generate with AI button that takes you through the guided flow for creating a model from a document.
Running your first prompt
The best way to learn Copilot is to ask it something about an existing project you already understand. Try one of these starter prompts:
- Summarize this model and tell me what it represents.
- List all tables that contain customer information.
- What are the relationships between orders and products?
- Which columns in this project look like they contain PII?
Review the response, then refine if needed. Copilot keeps the conversation context while the panel is open, so follow-up questions don’t need to repeat the project context.
What Copilot will and won’t do
Copilot proposes changes, it does not apply them. Any change to your model is shown as a proposal first. Review the proposed change and approve it before it lands in the model. Copilot never modifies the schema without explicit user action.
Copilot operates on schema metadata, not on live data. It reads tables, columns, relationships, descriptions, and governance flags inside SqlDBM. It does not run queries against your Snowflake, Databricks, or other connected database.
Copilot respects your permissions. If your SqlDBM role is read-only, Copilot will answer questions but any change it proposes still requires the edit rights you don’t have. It does not escalate permissions.
Next steps
Once you’ve run your first few prompts, move on to the article that matches what you’re trying to do:
- Building a new model from a document: see “Reverse engineering a model with Copilot.”
- Understanding an existing model: see “Talk to your model.”
- Applying standards across many objects: see “Bulk governance actions.”
- Configuring Copilot for your whole team: see “Configuring Copilot settings and pre-prompts.”
- Turning Copilot on for specific users: see “Enabling Copilot for your account and users.”
Related articles
- Reverse engineering a model with Copilot
- Talk to your model
- Bulk governance actions
- Configuring Copilot settings and pre-prompts
- Enabling Copilot for your account and users
- AI Security and Data Privacy