Rill lets you define BI workflows—models, metrics, dashboards and access policies—in YAML and SQL, and runs queries on engines like ClickHouse or DuckDB. It adds conversational and agent-driven interfaces for natural-language querying and automated dashboard generation, with real-time performance, embeddable dashboards, and Git-backed deployments.

Rill’s Metrics SQL lets you define business metrics once and query them using plain SQL across dashboards, notebooks, and AI agents. It compiles metric views into optimized OLAP queries, handling grouping, filters, time functions, and security automatically.

This article reruns a 2023 benchmark with the latest LLMs, comparing direct SQL generation against querying through a structured dbt Semantic Layer. It finds that while text-to-SQL accuracy has jumped, a modeled Semantic Layer still delivers near-perfect, deterministic results for covered queries, making it ideal for complex or critical use cases.