What is Flax?

A warehouse-native BI platform — a git-backed semantic layer, exploration, spreadsheet modelling, dashboards, and an AI assistant, all governed as code.

Flax is a warehouse-native business-intelligence platform. You point it at the data warehouse you already have — Postgres, Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery — define your metrics once in a git-backed semantic layer, and everyone in your organization explores, charts, and shares from that single source of truth.

The design goal is to combine the consistency of a modeled semantic layer with the agility of ad-hoc SQL and spreadsheets, without the per-viewer pricing that makes traditional BI expensive to roll out.

#How Flax fits together

Flax is a pipeline from raw tables to governed answers. Each stage builds on the one before it:

  1. Connections point Flax at your warehouse (or a CSV upload). Credentials are encrypted at rest and every outbound connection passes an SSRF egress guard.
  2. The semantic model is dbt-compatible YAML — dimensions, measures, and joins defined once. Because it lives in git, every change is reviewed and versioned.
  3. Explore turns the model into point-and-click queries. Flax compiles them to dialect-correct SQL and pushes the work down to your warehouse.
  4. Sheets let you model on top of query results with a familiar spreadsheet, including real-time multiplayer editing.
  5. Charts and dashboards visualize results with cross-filtering, drill-down, and a bespoke chart renderer.
  6. Actions, deliveries, and the AI assistant automate and accelerate the work.

#What makes Flax different

Note

Every metric is defined once as version-controlled YAML and then explored, charted, and shared everywhere — governed by row-level security in every surface.

  • Governed as code. Semantic changes flow through GitHub pull requests, so BI logic gets the same review as application code.
  • Warehouse-native. Queries compile per-dialect and run in your warehouse; Flax adds an embedded DuckDB engine only for spreadsheet modelling and blending.
  • Programmable. A REST API, an MCP server, and embeddable charts mean Flax is a building block, not a walled garden. See the Developer guide.

#Where to go next