Custom queries

Custom queries let you chart anything in your Weave data that the built-in charts don’t cover. Ask a question in plain English and Weave’s AI writes the SQL for you, or write the SQL yourself. You can preview the result, pick a chart type, and save it as a widget on a custom dashboard.

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Who can use it?

• Admin and Manager roles can add, edit, and delete custom query widgets
• Anyone who can view a dashboard can view the custom query widgets on it
• You can only add widgets to dashboards you can edit: organization dashboards, or restricted dashboards you created

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Adding a custom query widget

1. Open a custom dashboard and click the pencil icon to enter edit mode
2. Click Add widget
3. Under Custom, choose Custom query

The Custom query modal opens. If you close it without saving, the empty widget is removed. Unlike other charts, you can add as many custom query widgets to a dashboard as you like.

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Generating SQL with AI

To refine the result, reword your question and click Generate SQL again, or edit the SQL by hand. Each generation starts fresh, so put everything you need into the question. If the agent can’t answer, it tells you why, for example “No matching data found — check for typos or try rephrasing your question” or “The requested data category isn’t tracked by Weave”.

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Writing SQL manually

Click Write SQL manually to skip the AI and write the query yourself. A widget title is required in this mode. Click Use AI to switch back. Custom queries use the ClickHouse SQL dialect. See SQL rules for what’s supported.

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Previewing and saving

1. Click Preview to run the SQL. The preview shows up to 10,000 rows, with dashboard filters already applied
2. Adjust the chart type and settings (see Chart types)
3. Optionally add a Description, shown beneath the chart title
4. Click Save to dashboard

You must preview the current SQL before you can save. Editing the SQL clears the preview. Then click Done on the dashboard to save the layout.

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Editing and removing a widget

In dashboard edit mode, each custom query widget has:

• A chart type switcher in its header to change the chart type
• An Edit query button to reopen the modal with the question and SQL filled in
• An inline title and description you can click to edit
• An X button in the top-right corner to remove it from the dashboard

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Chart types

Weave picks a default based on the query: scatter when the query has x and y columns, line when it has a time column, bar when the AI provided chart settings, and table otherwise. Scatter queries can switch between table and scatter. All other queries can switch between table, bar, line, and pie. A line chart with no time column falls back to bar.

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Chart settings

For bar, line, pie, and scatter charts, you can change: Ratio divides the sum of a Numerator column by the sum of a Denominator column in each group, for example bugs opened divided by PRs merged. You can also raise the summed numerator to a Numerator power of 2 or 3. Ratio needs at least two numeric columns in the preview. The grouping column, value column, time column, and top-N limit are set by the AI. To change them, edit the question or the SQL. Bar and line charts grouped by people or teams have a sort menu: Alphabetical, Value, or Random.

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Tables

For tables, Group by collapses rows into one summary row per value of a text column. Expand a group to see its rows. The chart’s value column uses the widget’s aggregation (Sum, Average, or Count; Ratio shows as a sum), other numeric columns are summed by default, and text columns show a count of distinct values. Click any column header to sort.

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Headline number

Bar and line charts show a headline number in the top-right corner: a total for Sum and Count, or an average for Average and Ratio. When the chart has a time axis and a date filter is set, a pill shows the change against the previous period of the same length.

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Dashboard filters and granularity

Dashboard filters apply to a custom query only when its results include a matching column: If a query has no matching column for a filter, that filter doesn’t affect the widget and no warning is shown. The AI includes these columns by default. If you write SQL yourself, keep them in your SELECT so filters work, and leave date ranges out of the WHERE clause. Charts with a time column group rows by the dashboard’s granularity (day, week, month, quarter, year) in your organization’s timezone. See Filters and granularity. Queries that use a relative time axis, such as “weeks since each engineer’s first PR”, ignore the date filter.

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Drill-down and export

In view mode, click a bar, line point, pie slice, or scatter point to see the underlying rows. Drill-down shows the rows your SQL returned, so a query that returns one row per PR drills down to individual PRs, while a pre-aggregated query drills down to its aggregate rows. Drill-down requires drill-down permission for your role. Admins can click Export as CSV in a widget’s menu to download what’s on screen. See CSV export.

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Available data

Custom queries can read Weave’s analytics tables for your organization. Commonly used tables include: There are also tables for AI tool usage (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini, Windsurf, and others), CI/CD pipelines, calendars, and connected accounts. The AI can inspect any table’s columns while it works, so you don’t need to know table names to ask a question.

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Names and privacy

Columns that hold people, repository, team, or PR IDs display as names and avatars. This works only when the column keeps its original name, such as author_account_id, repository_id, or team_id. Renaming an ID column with AS shows the raw ID instead. To protect sensitive content, some columns can’t be queried, including email addresses, usernames, display names, PR descriptions, comment bodies, chat message text, and AI prompt content.

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SQL rules

Custom queries accept a single ClickHouse SELECT statement.

• Supported: joins, subqueries, CTEs (WITH), GROUP BY, HAVING, UNION ALL, and window functions (row_number, rank, dense_rank)
• Not supported: anything other than SELECT, UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT, WITH RECURSIVE, and comma-separated tables in FROM (use explicit JOINs)
• Functions: common aggregate, math, string, date, type conversion, conditional, array, and null-handling functions are allowed. For example count, sum, avg, countIf, uniqExact, round, lower, toStartOfWeek, dateDiff, if, multiIf, coalesce, and arrayJoin. Other functions return function "x" is not allowed. For conditional aggregates other than countIf and sumIf, use max(if(condition, column, NULL))
• Reserved words: quote columns such as url, type, key, and status when you prefix them with a table alias, for example pr."url"
• Order: if you don’t add ORDER BY, results are sorted by the first timestamp column, newest first

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Limits

Row limits are applied as a LIMIT, so a higher LIMIT in your SQL is lowered to the cap. If a query runs too long or scans too much data, narrow the date range or add filters.

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Data freshness

When you save a widget, Weave runs the query and stores the result. Saved widgets refresh about every hour as new data syncs, and the dashboard shows the stored result between refreshes. A newly saved widget may briefly show “Widget data is still being prepared. It will appear on the next refresh.”

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Privacy

Your question is sent to Weave’s AI model provider to generate the SQL. If your organization has opted out of prompt retention, the question text isn’t stored with the saved widget.

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Troubleshooting