Quickstart

In under ten minutes, you'll connect a datasource, define a business term, and watch Colrows compile your first governed query end-to-end.

Before you start

You'll need:

• A modern browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari).
• To connect your own data: the administrator role in your Colrows organization, and read-only credentials for the database - a JDBC connection string plus a username and password, a JSON private key, or custom driver credentials.
• If the database has no public endpoint, an SSH bastion Colrows can reach. See network options.

Step-by-step

1. Create your account

   Go to cloud.colrows.com/register and sign up with your email, then open the activation link Colrows sends you. You can also continue with Google or Microsoft. A self-service account joins the shared workspace as a Developer. Organizations that sign up through AWS Marketplace or Azure Marketplace get their own organization, and the person who signs up becomes its administrator.

2. Connect a datasource

   An administrator opens Administration → Connections → Datasources and selects + Datasource. Pick the Product (for example Snowflake, Databricks, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Trino, Oracle, or SQL Server), enter the JDBC connection string and credentials, and add SSL or an SSH tunnel if the database needs them. Turn on Restricted Access so data access and masking policies apply.

   # Example: PostgreSQL
   Connection String = jdbc:postgresql://db.acme.internal:5432/analytics
   Database          = analytics
   Authentication    = Username / Password

   Select Test Connection, then Add Datasource. Keep credentials out of the connection string: Colrows rejects a URL that contains them. The full field list is in Datasources.

3. Prepare the database

   Open Consensus → Pipelines, pick the datasource, and go to Update Settings. Choose the enrichment you want (generating missing descriptions is on by default), then select Save and Prepare Database. Colrows reads the metadata for the schemas and tables in the datasource's data scope, runs the selected enrichment, and makes the catalog available to AI search.

4. Define your first business term

   A curator or administrator opens Consensus → Catalog, chooses Business Term, and selects Create. Give it a label, a description, synonyms, and optionally the datasource, schema, and table it applies to.

   Label        : Active Customer
   Description  : A customer who has placed at least one
                  non-refunded order in the last 90 days.
   Synonyms     : active buyer, engaged customer
   Table        : analytics.orders

5. Ask your first question

   Open Colrows AI, choose the datasource, and ask:

   How many active customers did we have in EMEA last month?

   Colrows compiles the question through the semantic layer into dialect-perfect SQL, checks it against your data access, and runs it. The answer shows a confidence score with its explanation and the semantic sources it used. To write SQL yourself, use the Editor.

6. Invite your team

   In Administration → Users, select + User and enter each teammate's name, email, and password. Everyone is a Developer unless you list them under Admins or Curators in Administration → Settings → General. Attach the rules that apply to them in Data Access Policies and Data Masking Policies. On a datasource with Restricted Access on, policies are checked before every query runs, not bolted on as a row-mask after the fact.

What you've just done

You've stood up a four-stage runtime that resolves intent, proves joins, applies policy, and generates dialect-perfect SQL - without writing a single transformation. Everything you do from here builds on the same primitives.

Where to go next