Users currently face significant obstacles when trying to access and derive insights from GitLab data, as information is spread across multiple sources including PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, GraphQL, and REST APIs. Each of these data sources requires different query strategies and presents varying schemas, relationships, and performance characteristics. This fragmentation creates substantial friction in the data exploration process, requiring users to understand multiple systems and query languages to access the information they need. GitLab currently lacks a unified querying interface and visualization tool that can work consistently across these different data sources. This absence forces users to switch between different interfaces and tools, making it difficult to create comprehensive dashboards that combine data from multiple sources or to explore relationships between different types of data. The goal is to simplify how users interact with GitLab data, enabling them to discover meaningful insights about their GitLab usage and business performance without needing to understand the underlying differences between data sources. By addressing this challenge, we aim to unlock valuable data that is currently difficult or impossible for most users to access due to technical complexity. ### Resources * [Original investigation and proposal to use GLQL](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/525642#note_2447362814) * [Data Unification & Insights Strategy](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vd0Do9daZDfa6cvbSHqHSAdnkEdZT2oGxDg9aWzDCGs/edit?tab=t.0) * [Dashboard functionalities](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14VlATMlfRIyhWNKdrqjy0bmYYnTZWLYNIyA41vIUkqQ/edit?gid=0#gid=0) * [4 Pillars](https://www.figma.com/board/UaQCdWMCbVwssprXqWgvTQ/Organization-Level-Data-exploration-and-visualization?node-id=1-568&t=jeZXAmrsRPLs11rv-0) * Original vision: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/13798+