Company
Date Published
Author
Al Brown
Word count
2045
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The text explores the potential for using ClickHouse as a business intelligence (BI) tool and suggests a novel approach for BI in 2025 by developing a self-service analytics agent. This agent, implemented as a Slack bot, directly interacts with a ClickHouse data warehouse to process natural language queries and generate SQL queries through the integration of PydanticAI and the Anthropic API. The bot, which is connected to ClickHouse via the ClickHouse MCP server, aims to streamline the BI process by eliminating the multi-step, often inefficient, traditional BI approach. It allows users to interact with data directly through Slack, providing real-time answers and simplifying data exploration. The article guides the reader through setting up the Slack bot, configuring environment variables, and handling message interactions, while emphasizing the simplicity and potential for future enhancements, such as producing visual representations or integrating with external systems.