Introducing Smart Data Layer: AI-Powered Semantic Modeling in Minutes

Zing’s Smart Data Layer makes data governance and modeling fast and reliable

What if you could get all the benefits of a semantic layer—governed metrics, trusted results, consistent definitions—without spending weeks building it from scratch?

Today, we’re excited to introduce Smart Data Layer: Zing’s AI-powered approach that automatically generates your entire semantic model, then lets you refine it visually in minutes.

The Semantic Layer Paradox

Everyone agrees semantic layers are essential for data governance. Consistent metrics, controlled data access, a single source of truth—these benefits are undeniable. Yet most organizations don’t actually implement them.

Why? Because the traditional setup is crushing. Consider a mid-sized company with 50 tables in their data warehouse. Creating a semantic layer manually means documenting every table and column, identifying all foreign key relationships (including implicit ones), defining business metrics with correct aggregation rules, and writing all of this in JSON or YAML. For most organizations, that’s 40-80 hours of work—before schema changes start happening.

This creates a painful choice: skip the semantic layer and lose governance, or build it and face weeks of setup. What if there was a third option?

How Smart Data Layer Works

Smart Data Layer uses AI to analyze your data warehouse and automatically generate a complete semantic model in minutes. Here’s how:

1. Connect your data source (Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, etc.)

2. Click “Generate Smart Data Layer”

   

3. AI analyzes your warehouse to discover tables, identify join relationships (both explicit foreign keys and implicit naming patterns like customer_id), suggest business metrics, and recommend governance rules

4. Review in a visual editor where you can see all generated relationships, modify anything, and add business context. You can add / edit/ delete relationships, metrics, and table/views:

   

5. Activate your governed semantic model—natural language queries now execute only against defined, trusted relationships

What Makes This Different

This isn’t just another code generator. Smart Data Layer combines AI understanding with human judgment:

• AI does the heavy lifting, identifying nearly all relationships by recognizing patterns, understanding common data modeling schemas, and suggesting business-friendly metric names
• You provide business context, verifying relationships, adjusting rules, and adding descriptions
• Visual, not code-based editing means no JSON or YAML—just an interactive diagram with drag-and-drop refinement (though you can always view / export to JSON if you’d like!)
• Bound outputs enforce trust—once activated, queries can only execute against defined relationships, preventing incorrect aggregations and ensuring consistency

Real-World Impact

A fast-growing startup can go from connecting their data warehouse to having their entire company querying with governance—on day one. Instead of three weeks of setup, it’s two hours.

An enterprise migrating 150+ tables from Oracle to Snowflake can generate a semantic model for the new warehouse in minutes, compare it visually to the old model, and deploy in days instead of months.

The Zing Approach: Progressive Governance

At Zing, we believe data tools should adapt to how you work. That’s why we built progressive governance:

• Day 1: Use MagicModel to explore freely (no setup required)
• When you’re ready: Generate a Smart Data Layer (minutes, not weeks)
• As you grow: Refine governance rules based on actual usage
• Always: Keep flexibility for ad-hoc analysis with Expert Mode

Most BI tools force an all-or-nothing choice. Zing gives you incremental governance—start exploring immediately, add structure when you need it, and let AI help with the heavy lifting.

Get Started Today

Smart Data Layer is available now for Zing Pro and Enterprise customers. If you’re already on Pro or Enterprise, navigate to any data source settings, click “Smart Data Layer,” and generate your first model.

New to Zing? Start a free trial and see how fast governance can be.

For years, semantic layers have been the “vegetables” of data tools—everyone knows they should use them, but the setup effort makes them easy to skip. Smart Data Layer changes that equation.

Ready to govern your data without the pain? Try it today.

Zing’s Smart Data Layer supports PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, ClickHouse, and more.