What happens when I first connect a new data source to iDBQuery?
When you connect a source, iDBQuery introspects it — reading tables, columns, data types, and relationships — and builds a semantic understanding so you can start asking questions right away. There's no modelling project or pipeline to build first; onboarding is automatic and typically takes minutes, not weeks.
The first connection is where a lot of analytics tools demand weeks of setup. iDBQuery is designed so it's the opposite.
- Automatic introspection. On connect it scans the schema — tables, columns, types, keys, and relationships — to learn the structure of your data.
- Semantic bootstrap. A background enrichment step proposes meanings for cryptic tables and fields, seeding the semantic layer so plain-language questions work even on obscure schemas.
- Immediately queryable. Within minutes you can ask a real question and get a cited answer. As you connect more sources, they fold into one live queryable model spanning databases, spreadsheets, and documents.
For file and document sources, connecting also ingests and indexes the content (with OCR for scanned PDFs) so it becomes searchable and queryable. Throughout, there's no ETL to write and no warehouse to stand up — iDBQuery queries in place. You can refine as you go: add glossary terms, confirm a join, define a metric. But you don't have to do any of that before value; the point of automatic onboarding is that the first useful, cited answer is minutes away, not the end of a modelling project.
Updated 2026-06-22