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Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

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Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#52

Post by throwmeaway9876 »

nicktikhonov wrote: post #44
throwmeaway9876 wrote: post #42

Great tool! Pardon my technical ignorance, but what exactly is OpenAI's API being used for in this?

OpenAI LLM is used to generate SQL based on a combination of a user prompt and the database schema.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#55

Post by sgarland »

Genuinely do not understand the point of these tools. There is already a practically natural language to query RDBMS; it’s called SQL. I guarantee you, anyone who knows any other language could learn enough SQL to do 99% of what they wanted in a couple of hours. Give it a day of intensive study, and you’d know the rest. It’s just not that complicated.

Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#56

Post by nicktikhonov »

sgarland wrote: post #55

Genuinely do not understand the point of these tools. There is already a practically natural language to query RDBMS; it’s called SQL. I guarantee you, anyone who knows any other language could learn enough SQL to do 99% of what they wanted in a couple of hours. Give it a day of intensive study, and you’d know the rest. It’s just not that complicated.

and yet this was on the front page of hacker news for an entire day :D

it's all about friction. why spend minutes writing a query when you can spend 5 seconds speaking the result you want and get 90-100% of the way there.

Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#57

Post by sgarland »

nicktikhonov wrote: post #56
sgarland wrote: post #55

Genuinely do not understand the point of these tools. There is already a practically natural language to query RDBMS; it’s called SQL. I guarantee you, anyone who knows any other language could learn enough SQL to do 99% of what they wanted in a couple of hours. Give it a day of intensive study, and you’d know the rest. It’s just not that complicated.

and yet this was on the front page of hacker news for an entire day :D it's all about friction. why spend minutes writing a query when you can spend 5 seconds speaking the result you want and get 90-100% of the way there.

Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t, especially when using windowing functions and the like.

But honestly, most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins, which shouldn’t take you 5 minutes to write.

Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#58

Post by AdieuToLogic »

sgarland wrote: post #57
nicktikhonov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet this was on the front page of hacker news for an entire day :D it's all about friction. why spend minutes writing a query when you can spend 5 seconds speaking the result you want and get 90-100% of the way there.

Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t, especially when using windowing functions and the like. But honestly, most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins, which shouldn’t take you 5 minutes to write.

> Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t ...

This is the fundamental problem when attempting to use "GenAI" to make program code, SQL or otherwise. All one would have to do is substitute SQL with language/library of choice above and it would be just as applicable.

Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#59

Post by brulard »

sgarland wrote: post #55

Genuinely do not understand the point of these tools. There is already a practically natural language to query RDBMS; it’s called SQL. I guarantee you, anyone who knows any other language could learn enough SQL to do 99% of what they wanted in a couple of hours. Give it a day of intensive study, and you’d know the rest. It’s just not that complicated.

SQL is simple for simple needs, basic joins and some basic aggregates. Even that you won't learn in 2 hours. And that is just scratching the surface of what can be done in SQL and what you need to query. With LLMs and tools like this you simply say what you need in english, you don't need to understand the normalizations, m:n relation tables, CTEs, functions, JSON access operators, etc.

Re: Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

#60

Post by brulard »

sgarland wrote: post #57
nicktikhonov wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet this was on the front page of hacker news for an entire day :D it's all about friction. why spend minutes writing a query when you can spend 5 seconds speaking the result you want and get 90-100% of the way there.

Mostly because you don’t know if it’s correct unless you know SQL. It’s entirely too easy to get results that look correct but aren’t, especially when using windowing functions and the like. But honestly, most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins, which shouldn’t take you 5 minutes to write.

> most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins

Good for you. Some of us deal with more complex queries, even if it may not seems so from the outside. For example getting hierarchical data based on parent_id, while having non-trivial conditions for the parents and the children or product search queries which need to use trigram functions with some ranking, depending on product availability across stores and user preferences.

I agree knowing SQL is still useful, but more for double checking the queries from LLMs than for trying to build queries yourself.

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