# Satellite App ## What Is a Satellite App? A Satellite App on the BDB Platform is a lightweight, purpose-built application generated against the platform's SDK APIs. It extends the BDB Platform — the parent system — by exposing a narrow, opinionated experience for a specific user task, role, or operational context, while sourcing all of its data and intelligence from the platform itself. {% hint style="info" icon="bullseye-arrow" %} **Conceptually:** A Satellite App is to the BDB Platform what a moon is to a planet — it exists to support and enhance the parent's utility, not to replace it. Its value lies in the gravitational link to the parent: governed data, governed identity, and governed semantics. {% endhint %} ## Why Satellite Apps * [x] **Governed by Default:** Authentication, tenant scoping, connector entitlements, and Catalog access policies are inherited directly from the parent. Satellite Apps cannot reach beyond what the platform allows. * [x] **Semantically Anchored:** Apps consume Semantic Objects — governed JSON definitions mapping physical tables to business names, derived measures, and governed actions — rather than raw schemas. * [x] **GenAI-Native:** Optional Data Agents derive their behaviour from the active connector and authorised tables, allowing embedded LLM features to operate inside the user's data entitlements. * [x] **Rapid Time-to-Production:** A working Satellite App can be generated within hours rather than weeks, since the AI assistant handles SDK plumbing, authentication, and entitlement enforcement under the guidance of platform-provided skills. ## The BDB Build Model Satellite Apps on BDB are built through an AI-assisted, SDK-driven workflow. The platform exposes the BDB Platform SDK as the exclusive integration surface, and a GenAI coding assistant inside VS Code (Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex) translates an application requirement specification into a working Satellite App that consumes the SDK directly. The resulting application: * [x] Authenticates against the platform via the two-step Login flow. * [x] Is scoped to a tenant (workspace), and the connectors are entitled to that tenant. * [x] Consumes governed datasets, semantic definitions, and dashboard data through SDK calls. * [x] Optionally carries a platform-defined Data Agent (LLM-backed assist) into the runtime, scoped to the connector and tables the agent is authorised to access. {% hint style="info" %} **Note:** A Satellite App is not built from scratch. It is composed by combining the platform's SDK APIs with a GenAI assistant inside VS Code. The developer's contribution is the requirement specification and the iterative refinement; the assistant generates the code that consumes the APIs. {% endhint %} ## Core Concepts and Terminology The following terms appear repeatedly in the SDK, the platform UI, and throughout this guide.


Term	Definition
Space (workspace)	A logical tenant. Identified by a numeric BDB_SPACEKEY. Connectors, semantic models, and data agents are scoped to a space.
Customer key	The internal identifier for a tenant returned during the first step of authentication. The user picks a tenant by name; the key is internal.
Auth token	A short-lived bearer credential returned after authenticateUser. Sent on every subsequent request as the authtoken header.
Connector	A configured connection to an external data source (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, MySQL, etc.). Identified internally by dataSourceID, externally by dataSourceName.
Semantic Object	A JSON document describing a business entity: which tables to join, which columns to expose, which measures to compute, and which actions are allowed.
definitionQuery	The SQL SELECT at the heart of a semantic object. Defines the row-level shape the object presents.
Attribute	A column in the definitionQuery, mapped to a business name and metadata (data type, PII rules, synonyms, etc.).
Derived measure	A SQL expression plus an aggregation function (SUM/COUNT/AVG/…) that the platform applies at runtime to produce a KPI.
Derived dimension	A SQL CASE expression that buckets rows into segments — risk bands, geography, tenure groups.
Action	A governed write-back operation (INSERT / UPDATE / soft-delete) attached to a semantic object. Carries preConditions, role policy, and audit columns.
Service	A parameterised SELECT exposed by a semantic object — used for drill-down lookups.
Data Agent (assist)	An LLM-backed conversational agent scoped to a connector and tables. Answers natural-language questions and returns SQL plus chart-ready data.
Sandbox storage	The platform-managed file area used to persist user uploads. Identified by BDB_WORKSPACEKEY.
CORS proxy	A small server-side relay sitting in front of the platform. Required for browser apps because BDB endpoints are not directly callable from a different origin.

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