Decision models like Jev handle what SQL rules cannot. Here's how data teams use them
Sean Michael Kerner at VentureBeat • Oct 19, 2026
Data platforms make decisions all day. An SQL query keeps the rows over a threshold, matches a keyword, and joins two tables on a shared ID. A pipeline sends a failed job down a retry path. Rules like these work when the answer sits in the data in a clean form. MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, added a prompt_jev() SQL function to its paid plans. One example in its announcement pulls the main complaint from a table of support transcripts. On a company benchmark of 100,000 news articles from a public four-topic data set, MotherDuck reported that Jev labeled the rows in 40 seconds for 50 cents at 89% accuracy. An OpenAI model scored 88% in nearly 32 minutes at $37.58, according to MotherDuck.
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