Data Adventures

"But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (2025-Oct-13)  Recently, when I attended one of the IT conferences, there was a session where a presenter brought up the topic of ad-hoc data requests. The entire conference, and this particular session, was filled with AI narratives and promises of quick paths to data results driven by simple conversational queries. The presenter mentioned the term “ad-hoc data request” or perhaps “ad-hoc report”, I don’t quite remember which. But what struck me was the slightly lamenting tone she used, as if saying, “Oh, those poor little creatures…”. That made me think: what is the current state of such data requests? Is there still a place for such custom inquiries, a...