Your warehouse speaks one language.
Your teams speak ten.
Alma observes how your data is used, learns what it means, and enforces consistency automatically. Definitions drift? You get a PR, not an incident.
BY RESEARCHERS FROM
From query traffic to enforced contracts
Alma sits between your warehouse and the teams that query it. No manual definitions needed. Just point it at your traffic.
Observe
Alma watches query traffic flowing through your warehouse. Every SELECT, JOIN, and aggregation. Real usage from real teams.
Learn
From observed patterns, Alma builds a semantic model: what each column means, how metrics are computed, which definitions teams agree on and where they don't.
Enforce
Learned definitions become contracts. When a new query contradicts an established definition, Alma catches it before it reaches production.
Ship
Drift detected? Alma opens a PR with the fix. Your existing review workflow handles the rest. No new tools, no context switching.
Semantic drift is eating your data alive
Ask two teams for 'revenue' and you'll get two different numbers. Not a bug. A missing layer.
Different teams, different definitions
Marketing calculates MRR one way. Finance another. Both are 'right' in their context. Both produce different board decks.
Definitions rot silently
Someone changes a WHERE clause. A column gets renamed. Six months later, three dashboards show conflicting numbers and nobody knows which one drifted.
Manual contracts don't scale
You can write data contracts by hand. But who updates them? Who reviews 500 metric definitions across 12 teams? Contracts without enforcement are just documentation.
Airbnb solved this with Minerva: a dedicated platform team, years of work. Alma gets you there without the headcount.
Why traffic beats documentation
Traffic is ground truth
Query patterns reveal the real semantic model: how teams define metrics, which columns carry meaning, what joins are canonical.
Learned definitions, not prescribed
Alma learns from observed behavior, then proposes definitions you review and adopt. No upfront ontology required.
PR-native enforcement
When definitions drift, Alma opens a pull request. Fixes flow through your existing review process: git, dbt, CI/CD.
Confidence-scored contracts
Alma scores definitions by confidence: high (consistent), medium (some variance), low (conflicting). You decide what to enforce.