"Data's such a bespoke art. Every company I've worked with has a completely different data stack; all assembling from whatever cloth we have."

To kick off 2026, check out our updated episode with @lloydtabb.bsky.social. Lloyd's insight goes deeper than infrastructure chaos.

datatalks.rilldata.com

What makes Rill's AI agent different?

The most powerful feature of our AI Chat is its transparency, and we also designed it to be pluggable. When the AI answers your question, it automatically generates links to your dashboards, allowing you to see exactly where the numbers came from.

In Rill 0.78 (the final release of 2025), we introduce dynamic content in Markdown components.

Want to take it even further? You can render HTML too! Plus, we're making the backend endpoint public so you can easily build your own programs and workflows that need access to templated data.

“Sometimes the best reward isn't money. It's watching the giants scramble to copy your stupid SQL feature." - Hannes Mühleisen, DuckDB

In the updated episode, we discussed:
→ Why they worked in secret for a year
→ Why 99% of analytics workloads don't need distributed systems

datatalks.rilldata.com

At a recent @clickhouse.com meetup in SF, @medriscoll.com shared the importance of FinOps. His demo shows how in just a few minutes you can connect to a ClickHouse table, automatically generate a dashboard, and slice & dice to see how much you’re spending on tools.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejOK...

We’re excited to share the Gemini CLI extension for Rill 🎉 Now you can instantly dive deep into analysis using Rill's metrics layer via MCP.

Using Gemini's CLI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), you can explore metrics, identify trends, and generate insights without writing queries manually.

"If it doesn't scale out, it's useless." Database reviewers dismissed @duckdb.org's approach with comments like this.

6 years later: 1M+ monthly users, 10x faster than Spark on the same hardware.

We updated our DTTR episodes. Watch the full talk with @hannes.muehleisen.org

datatalks.rilldata.com

ICYMI - Matthaus Krzykowski (CEO of dltHub) joined Michael Driscoll to break down the biggest shifts happening in data engineering right now.

👉Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping the future of data.
datatalks.rilldata.com

@medriscoll.com joined Katrin Ribant on Knowledge Distillation. The episode offers a forward-looking view on the “AI analyst” skill set & the future of self-serve analytics.

"Data engineering is critical because we have the opportunity to have the one human data team."

ask-y.ai/knowledge-di...

Also in Rill 0.77, now you can highlight a time range in a dashboard and have the AI explain anomalies. This is useful to quickly gain insights for drops or increases in metrics and get a detailed summary as to why a metric is moving in a certain direction.

Learn more:
docs.rilldata.com/notes/0.77

In Rill .77, we added a dependency graph viewer that allows you to easily visualize the dependencies within a project to see how changes to a model could affect downstream metrics.

We also added the ability to generate test data using AI. This is super useful to get up & running in Rill Developer.

Code-first data tools were built for experts. Then AI made them accessible to everyone.

On the new episode of Data Talks on the Rocks, @medriscoll.com and dltHub's Matthaus Krzykowski break down the shift: LLMs are abstracting away complexity in data pipeline building, and the results are dramatic.

ICYMI - @medriscoll.com sat down with Joe Reis for a breakdown of what Joe calls the “Great Data Reset".

Top Takeaways:
- AI has vaporized old advantages - giving sharp builders new leverage
- Classical ML + NLP are coming back swinging
- How to stand out when 500+ engineers flood every job posting

Data Talks on the Rocks is BACK 🥃

AI shockwaves, mass consolidation, & collapsing toolchains have pushed every practitioner back to zero. But Joe Reis flips the script: this isn’t a meltdown - it’s the biggest opportunity builders have had in a decade.

Find the episode here: datatalks.rilldata.com

Data Talks on the Rocks is where builders sit down, trade stories, & get real about the work. The failures that taught more than any victory. No hype, no jargon, just real conversations about how things actually get built.

A podcast for the ones that keep building. Subscribe👇
datatalks.rilldata.com

In Rill .75, AI agents can now return rich visualizations directly in the chat. We also updated the homepage to help you get started faster!

This builds on the last release of citation URLs & full semantic layer access, making Rill’s AI agent even more powerful for analysis and collaboration.

Rill 0.75 is out with tons of exciting features we'll highlight over the week.

Up first is Dark Mode for Rill Developer 😎

We carefully refined chart palettes and UI elements so everything looks great in both light and dark themes.

Keep an eye out for dark mode support in Rill Cloud coming soon!