PRODUCTION SCENARIO
A Generative AI Engineer builds an internal IT assistant that answers "How many licenses are left for Figma?" thousands of times a day. The query is always the same lookup against one Unity Catalog table, with the product name as the only variable.
Which structured retrieval tool should the engineer build for this lookup?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: A Unity Catalog SQL function that takes the product name as a parameter
Databricks guidance is to build a structured retrieval tool as a Unity Catalog SQL function when the query is known ahead of time and the agent only supplies the parameters. Genie suits open-ended natural-language exploration, and embedding rows for a keyed lookup adds cost and imprecision.