BI MCP or Warehouse MCP?

Answer a few questions. Get one verdict.

Semantic path — governed metrics, such as Looker, the dbt Semantic Layer, Cube, or warehouse-native semantic views.

Raw path — direct SQL or warehouse access.

One question I keep getting as a BI MCP builder serving a large enterprise user base: which MCP should I use for this use case? Not ‘which one is better’ — which doorway for this job. I got tired of answering it from scratch every time, so I turned the answer into a short decision flow. Answer for one specific use case — the gates run in order, and the first one that decides, decides. If it saves your team one confused architecture meeting, it did its job.