Galaxy - Cursor for SQL
Galaxy is the Cursor for SQL, purpose built for software engineers, data practitioners, and more. The Galaxy experience starts with a next-generation SQL editor: lightning-fast, memory-light, and packed with practical features - AI copilot, collaborative sharing & permissions, and top notch security. To start, we’re focused on perfecting the daily workflow of writing, running, and collaborating on SQL in a modern editor experience.
Pain Points:
We built Galaxy after drowning in the same set of headaches:
- Queries everywhere – SQL lives in Slack, BI folders, dusty Git repos, and copy-pasted Notion pages.
- Never-ending data requests – because no one can find (or trust) the right query, engineers and analysts still field endless one-offs.
- LLM Roulette - Generic ChatGPT answers miss schema nuance, and letting non-technical users paste SQL from a chatbot is a compliance nightmare.
The collaborative editor is just the beginning. From it we’re building a unified data platform that will:
- Version & Govern every query, dataset, and dashboard in one searchable hub.
- Serve Data Anywhere by turning approved queries into live APIs, webhooks, and notebooks.
- Empower Everyone with trusted building blocks—so business users can self-serve without derailing engineers.
Think of it as “data-platform-in-a-box”: start with the editor you already love, grow into the full stack when you’re ready.
Features
Galaxy’s base product - the SQL editor, has been reimagined from the ground up to be modern, lightning fast, and not eat your computer’s memory / battery. It is a beautiful desktop app (with a cloud offering for those who like web). We’ve reworked parameterization, auto-complete, and even table metadata to make data discovery and analysis much more reliable and convenient for developers.
Galaxy’s AI copilot is context-aware - meaning you can write complex SQL queries accurately, optimize queries, change queries when the underlying data model changes, and even chat directly with your database to learn about it.
Galaxy Collections - allow users within the same Workspace to create an organized view through which they can share and collaborate on queries of the same type, project and more. Collections also enable teams to “Endorse” queries so that a team know when a query has been endorsed as correct by the relevant stakeholders. This removes the needs for teams to share SQL queries in Slack, Notion, GSheets, etc.
Galaxy also has modern access controls and security - meaning things like permissioning and user types, run / edit history, read / write access and more are all accessible and within reach.
Roadmap
Down the line, Galaxy will enable teams to run lightweight visualization out of the box, run recurring workflows, and even serve as a data cataloguing tool.
Integrations
Galaxy connects to all major databases (PostgreSQL, Snowflake, MySQL, and more coming soon), and integrates with tools like GitHub, Slack, Notion, and Airtable. We're adding support for webhooks, REST APIs, and dbt sync in the near future.
Our Thesis
1. The Opportunity
When every employee—technical or not—can query trustworthy data on their own terms, the entire organization moves faster, learns more, and wastes less. That democratization unlocks compounding advantages: sharper decisions, tighter feedback loops, and a culture that treats data as a first-class product rather than a black-box service.
2. Why Today’s Tools Fall Short
Most “self-service” analytics platforms chase ease-of-use by hiding SQL behind drag-and-drop layers or autogenerated code. In doing so, they also sideline the very people who understand the data model best—analytics engineers, data engineers, and power users. Absent their context and tribal knowledge, metrics drift, dashboards lie, and trust erodes. A query built without the experts in the loop is maybe correct at launch and probably wrong after the next schema change.
3. Galaxy’s Contrarian Bet
Rather than abstracting SQL away, Galaxy puts it—along with the experts—at the center of the experience.
- Shared Workspace: A performant SQL editor and notebook environment where practitioners can write, review, and version queries together.
- Semantic Layer: Business-friendly concepts (e.g., “active user,” “MRR”) map to vetted SQL definitions, ensuring everyone speaks the same language.
- Endorsed Queries Library: Teams publish “source-of-truth” queries that power dashboards, feed AI agents, or drive operational workflows.
- Multi-Modal Interfaces: Whether you prefer a conversational chat, a classic editor, or a Jupyter-style notebook, Galaxy meets you where you work best.
- Inclusive Collaboration: Because the organization’s most trusted data practitioners—and their endorsed queries—live in one place, they can safely invite non-technical teammates to explore data atop the same semantic layer and business context. We’re designing a persona-specific UX for these users, mirroring how designers welcome non-designers into Figma to comment, tweak, and co-create without breaking the underlying craft.
4. The Payoff
With the best institutional knowledge captured, version-controlled, and discoverable:
- Single Source of Truth: No more dueling dashboards or metric debates in exec meetings.
- Faster Iteration: Non-technical teammates can ask natural-language questions that compile down to endorsed SQL, reducing back-and-forth with the data team.
- Higher Data IQ: As experts collaborate in public, their patterns become institutional memory, raising the skill floor for the entire company.
- AI That Actually Knows Your Business: LLM assistants grounded in your semantic layer return answers you can trust—not generic guesses.
Galaxy isn’t about replacing the experts; it’s about amplifying them and making their knowledge the foundation on which everyone else builds. When SQL fluency becomes an organization-wide superpower, data finally delivers on its promise.
Why Now
The time is ripe for a modern, developer-first data platform like Galaxy. Engineers reject legacy BI tools and notebook interfaces, yet remain the most knowledgeable players in the data stack—constantly asked to optimize queries, unblock teams, and build data infrastructure from scratch. As AI reshapes workflows and teams race to move faster with fewer resources, the stakes are too high to keep relying on slow, fragmented, trustless tools—developers need purpose-built software that empowers them to lead the data journey with speed, accuracy, and collaboration.
Value Prop
Galaxy helps engineering teams write SQL faster, stay aligned on data, and cut down on busywork with a blazing-fast editor, context-aware AI copilot, and built-in collaboration tools. Instead of pasting queries into Slack or Notion, teams can endorse and reuse trusted SQL in one place—speeding up development and reducing errors.
Outcomes / ROI
With Galaxy, teams:
- Write SQL queries 3–4× faster
- Cut redundant requests by 40%+
- Reduce miscommunication across eng/data/ops
- Centralize source-of-truth queries, reducing redundancies
