The Dronk blog
Querying, in plain English
Notes on databases, schema design, and the work behind turning everyday questions into trustworthy SQL.
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Engineering
Replacing your BI dashboard with a question box
Dashboards answer the questions you had last quarter. Most real questions show up the moment you're looking at one.
Ryan Chandler 3 min read Read -
Announcements
Introducing Dronk: ask your database anything
Why we're building a tool that turns plain-English questions into trustworthy SQL, and runs it safely against your own connection.
Ryan Chandler 3 min read Read -
Marketing
Stop waiting on the data team
The bottleneck on most data questions isn't difficulty. It's a queue. Here's what changes when the queue disappears.
Ryan Chandler 2 min read Read -
Engineering
Keeping generated SQL safe by default
Letting an agent write queries against a production database sounds terrifying. Here's the layered way we make it boring instead.
Ryan Chandler 3 min read Read -
Engineering
How Dronk reads your Postgres and MySQL schema
A tour of the indexing layer that turns a live database into the context an agent needs to write correct SQL.
Ryan Chandler 3 min read Read -
Engineering
Why understanding your schema matters more than the SQL
Anyone can generate syntactically valid SQL. The hard part is knowing what your columns actually mean.
Ryan Chandler 2 min read Read -
Marketing
Beyond the CSV export
The export button is where good data goes to get stale. There's a better default than dumping rows into a spreadsheet.
Ryan Chandler 2 min read Read -
Engineering
What happens when you ask for a million rows
Some questions touch a lot of data. Here's how Dronk returns a useful answer without letting a careless query take down your database.
Ryan Chandler 3 min read Read