Data engineering·Governance, privacy and meaning
the definition of active user lives in one place that every dashboard, notebook and export queries through, instead of being re-implemented in each.
Semantic layer
Also calledmetrics layer, headless BI
A layer where metrics, dimensions and joins are defined once and consumed by every downstream tool. It exists because the alternative is the same business logic copied into a BI tool, three notebooks and a spreadsheet, drifting independently. The trade is another abstraction between the analyst and the SQL, and its success depends entirely on whether it covers enough that people stop going around it.