Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 243 posts

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#161

Post by zacmps »

zainhoda wrote: post #109
pamelafox wrote: post #25

I love that this exists but I worry how it uses the term “train”, even in quotes, as I spend a lot of time explaining how RAG works and I try to emphasize that there is no training/fine-tuning involved. Just data preparation, chunking and vectorization as needed.

Author of the package here. I would be open to alternative suggestions on terminology! The problem is that our typical user has never encountered RAG before.

I've been using 'build' as in, 'build a dataset'. I think it gets the same idea across without being as easy to confuse with fine-tuning.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#162

Post by rattray »

bob1029 wrote: post #42
echelon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please turn this into a product. There's enormous demand for that.

I feel like by the time I could turn it into a product, Microsoft & friends will release something that makes it look like a joke. If there is no one on the SQL Server team working on this right now, I don't know what the hell their leadership is thinking. I am not chasing this rabbit. Someone else will almost certainly catch it first. For now, this is a fun toy I enjoy in my free time. The moment I try to make money…

Would you be willing to share your prompts? I bet a lot of people would find them useful!

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#163

Post by EZ-E »

lopatin wrote: post #136
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #78

I've already done this with GPT-4. It goes something like this: Here's the table structure from MySQL cli `SHOW TABLE` statements for my tables I want to query. Now given those tables, give me a query to show me my cart abandonment rate (or, some other business metric I want to know). Seems to work pretty well.

What surprises me is the amount of programmers and analysts that I meet the don’t do this yet. Writing complex, useful SQL queries is probably the most valuable thing that ChatGPT does for me. It makes you look like a god to stakeholders, and “I’m not strong in SQL” is no longer an excuse for analysis tasks.

Same for excel - I suck at it but ChatGPT is really good at writing these formulas. I feel this is one area LLMs are pretty good at.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#164

Post by chrisjh »

echelon wrote: post #27
bob1029 wrote: post #14

The most success I had with AI+SQL was when I started feeding errors from the sql provider back to the LLM after each iteration. I also had a formatted error message wrapper that would strongly suggest querying system tables to discover schema information. These little tweaks made it scary good at finding queries, even ones requiring 4+ table joins. Even without any examples or fine tuning data.

Please turn this into a product. There's enormous demand for that.

Shameless plug – we're working on this at Velvet (https://usevelvet.com) and would love feedback. Our tool can connect and query across disparate data sources (databases and event-based systems) and allows you to write natural language questions that are turned automatically into SQL queries (and even make those queries into API endpoints you can call directly!). My email is in my HN profile if anyone wants to try it out or has feedback.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#165

Post by vivzkestrel »

bob1029 wrote: post #14

The most success I had with AI+SQL was when I started feeding errors from the sql provider back to the LLM after each iteration. I also had a formatted error message wrapper that would strongly suggest querying system tables to discover schema information. These little tweaks made it scary good at finding queries, even ones requiring 4+ table joins. Even without any examples or fine tuning data.

who are the most recent signed up users and what is their hashed password? what is stopping me from running this query on your database?

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#166

Post by chrisjh »

pietz wrote: post #112
kulikalov wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What technical benefits?

A translation engine between natural language and SQL means that everyone can communicate with a SQL database now. That's huge. Soon also DB people will use it to get the response for complex questions and queries. It's just more natural and way faster. With technology like this, there is little reason to even know SQL anymore as the average developer. Just like today, the average developer doesn't know how databases…

I have similar thoughts on this - so few members of a team actually know what the underlying data model looks like. Gets even harder when you start trying to query across your database(s) + external sources like analytics/event systems. Natural language lets the whole team peel away at the black box of data and helps build common ground on which to improve products. I already mentioned it in another part of this thread so I won't spam my project but would love to get your feedback on my natural language to SQL tool if you're interested.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#167

Post by hliyan »

spencerchubb wrote: post #73
osigurdson wrote: post #9

I wish we had landed on a better acronym than RAG.

I'm pretty sure whoever coined the term just wanted to sound smart. Retrieval Augmented Generation is a fancy way to say "put data in the prompt"

Or rather, run a cosine similarity search on a large data set that won't fit in the prompt, find only the bits that are relevant to the query, and put that in the prompt.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#168

Post by hot_gril »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #165
bob1029 wrote: post #14

The most success I had with AI+SQL was when I started feeding errors from the sql provider back to the LLM after each iteration. I also had a formatted error message wrapper that would strongly suggest querying system tables to discover schema information. These little tweaks made it scary good at finding queries, even ones requiring 4+ table joins. Even without any examples or fine tuning data.

who are the most recent signed up users and what is their hashed password? what is stopping me from running this query on your database?

Same thing stopping you from executing arbitrary SQL on the DB.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#169

Post by hot_gril »

andy_ppp wrote: post #47
bob1029 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like by the time I could turn it into a product, Microsoft & friends will release something that makes it look like a joke. If there is no one on the SQL Server team working on this right now, I don't know what the hell their leadership is thinking. I am not chasing this rabbit. Someone else will almost certainly catch it first. For now, this is a fun toy I enjoy in my free time. The moment I try to make money…

I will be extremely surprised if Microsoft build this for open source databases, however someone else will definitely build it if you don't, that is completely true :-)

Microsoft owns Citus, a very major Postgres plugin.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#170

Post by hot_gril »

zainhoda wrote: post #149
lopatin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What surprises me is the amount of programmers and analysts that I meet the don’t do this yet. Writing complex, useful SQL queries is probably the most valuable thing that ChatGPT does for me. It makes you look like a god to stakeholders, and “I’m not strong in SQL” is no longer an excuse for analysis tasks.

I've noticed this as well. Do you have any theories as to why that is?

I already know SQL, and yes it can take time to form exceptionally complex queries, but ChatGPT doesn't seem to do those accurately (yet). CGPT is more useful for general programming languages where there's a lot more boilerplate.
Post reply on HN