Animovel Open Source Datalake and Chatbot

Animovel has made furniture for more than 60 years. The business runs on an ERP, and on applications we built for dashboards, stock control and other daily work. All of it lives in Microsoft SQL Server.

A year ago the computing load pushed us to a new server. SQL Server is paid per processor core, and we hold far fewer licenses than cores, so most of the machine stays idle.

At this hackathon we built a datalake in PostgreSQL, an open-source database, and organized it as a star schema. Core holds the basics, such as customers and orders. Mart holds what a dashboard, a website or an application needs. The server is in use, and the SQL Server cores are free for the ERP.

We then put a RAG layer on that data, so our agents can find where an answer lives before they query. It worked well, so we opened it to the company. A chat site takes a question, runs the RAG, and sends the relevant passages through OpenRouter to a model we choose. The model returns an SQL query. We validate it, run it on the new database, validate the result, and show that result.