iDBQuery vs Snowflake Cortex Analyst: what's the difference?

Cortex Analyst is Snowflake's natural-language layer. You define a semantic model over your Snowflake tables and users can ask questions that it turns into SQL against Snowflake. If your data is consolidated in Snowflake and you want NL analytics native to it, Cortex Analyst is a sensible, well-integrated option.

iDBQuery is built to span more than one platform:

• Not warehouse-locked. iDBQuery connects to Snowflake as a standard warehouse, but also to PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Excel, CSV, Sheets, PDFs, folders (with OCR) and REST APIs, unifying them into one live model so a single question can cross all of them.
• Cited to the row. Every figure links back to the exact source rows, wherever they live.
• Deploy outside the warehouse. Cloud, your own VPC, a Desktop app, or fully air-gapped; you are not required to route everything through one vendor's cloud.
• Semantic layer included. iDBQuery builds its own understanding of cryptic schemas without you hand-authoring a model per source.

Cortex Analyst is a strong choice when Snowflake is your single source of truth. iDBQuery is the better fit when data is spread across several systems and files, when you need answers that cite their rows, or when deployment cannot be tied to one cloud warehouse.