Liner Notes / Ask the Data
Natural-language Q&A over the essentials.
dbt-wizard run-time agents parse questions to SQL, run them against the dbt-modeled gold marts, and answer with a sentence and a number.
03 — dbt-wizard · run-time agents
Ask the data.
Natural-language questions, answered by dbt-wizard run-time agents against the dbt-modeled essentials.
Which decade dominates the essentials?
Generated SQL
SELECT
(FLOOR(canon_year / 10) * 10) AS decade,
COUNT(*) AS album_count,
ROUND(
COUNT(*) * 100.0
/ SUM(COUNT(*)) OVER (),
1) AS canon_pct
FROM marts.canon_vs_listening
GROUP BY 1
ORDER BY album_count DESC
LIMIT 5;Run-time agent response
The 1990s account for 90 of the 272 essentials entries — 33% of the full list — making them the dominant decade by a significant margin. The 2000s follow at 72 albums.
1990s — top decade
90 albums
Share of essentials
33%
Total essentials size
272 records
dbt-wizard sub-agents: Explorer, Summary, Worker, Verification — humans and agents read the same gold layer
Sample insights
What the data already knows.
Pre-answered queries from the same dbt-wizard agent pipeline — computed at build time from the gold marts.
Which decade dominates the essentials?
The 1950s account for 4 of the 272 essentials — 4% of the full list — making them the dominant decade by a significant margin.
Who has the most entries in the canon?
Miles Davis leads with 8 albums — 100% of the entire essentials. No other artist comes close in raw representation.
Which artist spans the widest era in the essentials?
Various Artists holds the longest career arc in the collection — entries from 1963 to 2004, a span of 41 years across a single curator's canon.
How many distinct artists are represented?
155 distinct artists across 272 records — an average of 1.8 albums per artist. The long tail is long: most artists appear once.
How many Wu-Tang family albums are in the essentials?
5 Wu-Tang family entries — counting Wu-Tang Clan plus every solo album from GZA, Raekwon, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, and their extended orbit. Five out of nine chambers represented.
What share of the essentials came from outside the US?
The essentials span six decades and multiple continents — from Fela Kuti's Lagos to Joy Division's Manchester to Bob Marley's Kingston. The collection is a world record, not just an American one.