Select Star hosted its annual Product Forum this month to bring together our users and discuss the latest advancements in data discovery, governance, and AI readiness. The event showcased our commitment to empowering data teams with tools that enhance clarity, collaboration, and control over their data assets.
Select Star is a modern data governance platform that helps organizations manage and understand their data at scale — enabling AI, analytics, and self-service across the business. It automatically catalogs datasets, traces end-to-end lineage, and builds a shared business glossary and semantic layer, so teams can confidently work with trusted data.
Table of Contents
- Where Data Teams are Headed in 2025
- Major Product Announcements
- What to Look Forward to with Select Star
Where Data Teams are Headed in 2025
AI is rapidly changing how teams think about work, and data is no exception. We're seeing a shift toward workflows designed around AI from the start, supported by tools that are more accurate and capable than ever before. A key example is text-to-SQL interfaces, which are becoming production-ready thanks to improved accuracy. We're also moving toward more autonomous systems that don't just assist analysts but begin to take action on their own.
This evolution is reshaping how data teams operate. Here are the key developments to watch:
- AI for Analytics Self-Service: Semantic models are becoming essential for enabling AI tools to interpret and query data accurately. Teams are investing in a strong semantic layer to power better search and interaction.
- AI Coding Assistants: More teams are using AI tools for analytics, debugging, and even migrating models or pipelines. This helps engineers and analysts speed up their workflows.
- Autonomous Agents: We're seeing early signs of agents that can take over repetitive tasks, such as lineage mapping or usage auditing, reducing manual effort.
The common denominator across all of these trends? AI performance is only as good as the metadata and semantic foundation it's built on. Select Star plays a key role here by helping data teams organize and maintain a high-quality semantic layer, so AI tools can actually understand and act on the data.
Major Product Announcements
We’ve released product updates that enable data teams as they face more complexity, increased governance needs, and new demands from AI initiatives. These improvements focus on making it easier to manage change, document data more effectively, and support data users with better tooling for everyday tasks.
AI
AI is becoming a foundational part of how modern data teams work from discovery and documentation to analysis and automation. At Select Star, we’ve built a suite of AI-powered capabilities that support this shift and help organizations scale their data efforts.
- Semantic Model Generation: Select Star ingests and analyzes metadata, usage logs, and query history to reverse engineer and generate relationships, metric definitions, and business terminology mappings needed to autogenerate a semantic model for Snowflake Cortex Analyst. Cortex Analyst uses these models to translate natural language into SQL, giving business users instant answers from Snowflake without needing to write queries.
- Metric Generation: Select Star now makes it effortless to define metrics for BI platforms like Power BI and Tableau, allowing organizations to centralize their definitions and reduce inconsistencies across reports.
- AI-Powered SQL Explanations: For any query, users can now view simplified, AI-generated explanations that demystify what the SQL is doing. This feature makes it easier for newer team members to understand and trust complex logic, and accelerates onboarding for analysts.
- Custom AI Settings: Admins can configure what the AI sees and interacts with, ensuring it only accesses the most relevant assets. Control how Select Star AI works for you all in one place. Enable or disable features, customize Ask AI responses, and control what data assets Ask AI has access to.
Together, these updates help teams do more with their data faster, more accurately, and with less manual work.
User Experience
As more roles rely on data to do their jobs, data tools need to support everyone, not just analysts. Business users don’t want to navigate schemas or interpret technical column names. We continue to invest in an intuitive and thoughtful user interface to make it easy for all users to adopt Select Star. Here are a few of our recent releases:
- Collections: A new, visual way to organize and surface what matters, from dashboards and tables to docs, by domain, team, or project. Collections provide structure and context, so users can browse and trust what they find.
- New UI: A refreshed web app with a cleaner, modern layout that’s easier to navigate, making onboarding and everyday use smoother for everyone.
- Slack App: Search for data, ask questions, and get alerts directly in Slack bringing data discovery into the flow of work.
These updates make it easier for anyone at your company to discover, understand, and use the right data, helping drive a truly data-literate culture.
Data Operations
Data is always changing, whether it’s new tables, updated logic, or pipeline refreshes. These changes are necessary to support the business, but they also come with risk. It's easy to miss downstream impacts or leave stakeholders in the dark.
To help, Select Star has evolved from just showing you data relationships to helping you stay on top of issues and communicate them effectively.
- Data Quality Monitoring: A new Data Quality tab on every asset shows relevant checks and failures, so you can spot issues faster. For customers using Monte Carlo, test failures are now visible directly in Select Star, closing the loop between observability and discovery.
- Upstream Issue Tracking: Dashboards now display if there’s a known issue in a source table, giving end users better context and reducing duplicate troubleshooting.
- Change Notifications: We’ve expanded our notification system to include organization-wide Slack or email alerts, team-based preferences, and support for favorited assets. You can choose what types of changes you want to hear about: schema updates, metadata edits, or new discussions.
These updates mean fewer surprises, faster resolution times, and better alignment between data producers and consumers.
Integrations
The more systems Select Star connects to, the more complete and useful your metadata becomes. We’re continuing to expand our integrations across the modern data stack to help customers bring in metadata, usage signals, and business context from wherever their data lives.
Over the past year, we’ve launched support for new source systems and tools like Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Db2, Salesforce, Hex, Airflow, and Fivetran. These integrations give data teams better visibility into upstream systems and allow for richer, more accurate lineage and impact analysis.
- Salesforce: Our new Salesforce integration includes support for CRM Analytics, reports, and dashboards, making it easier to trace how upstream changes impact downstream metrics. In one case, a customer caught a potential double-counting issue due to a schema change before it affected reporting, thanks to the visibility provided by Select Star.
- Fivetran: With our latest Fivetran integration, teams can see which applications data originates from, such as Salesforce or NetSuite, without cluttering the catalog with redundant or intermediary assets. This gives data teams better insight into source systems while keeping documentation clean. (Note: This feature requires Fivetran Enterprise.)
What to Look Forward to with Select Star
This year’s Product Forum showcased four major themes: AI, user experience, data operations, and integrations - each focused on making data work easier and more effective. Looking ahead, we’re excited to expand our AI capabilities, including bringing Ask AI into the Chrome Extension to support in-context discovery across BI and data tools. Intelligent agents are on the way to help automate tasks like documentation, dashboard organization, and cleanup. We’re also expanding integrations, with support for Hive and Azure on the horizon, and deepening governance features so teams can fine-tune access and AI behavior to suit their needs.
Whether it’s smarter automation, more control, or deeper connectivity, Select Star is building toward a more intelligent, accessible data experience. If you’re interested in learning more or getting early access to what’s coming next, reach out to our team. We’d love to connect.
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