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Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

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Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s daylight between personal toolsmithing and a VC-backed startup (both are fun sometimes and a grind sometimes). I’m getting together a bunch of related-sounding stuff in terms of integrating modern models into my workflow to polish up a bit and release MIT. If you’d like to have a hand tidying it up a little and integrating it with e.g. editors and stuff, I think the bundle would be a lot cooler for it!

Microsoft may well catch the rabbit that queries schemas and generates valid SQL. But that rabbit can't understand the meaning of the data just by looking at column names and table relationships. Let's say you want to know how sales and inventory are doing compared to last year at your chain of retail stores. Will Microsoft's rabbit be smart enough to know that the retail business is seasonal, so it must compare the…

If I can TLDR your comment, which I agree with: the real value is in doing real work.

“Hustlers” burn countless hours trying to “optimize” work out of the picture.

Historically, there’s a lot of money in just sitting down with a to-do list of customer problems and solving them at acceptable cost, come hell or high water.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#192
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This somewhat already exists in the form of semantic layers, which if done well can handle many of the queries necessary in the course of business without business users needing to know any SQL. There will still be cases where you need direct SQL, and AI tools can help the development process there at a minimum.

Yes, there will be cases where you need SQL knowledge. There will also always be cases where knowing exactly how a database works under the hood is necessary. I think this is somewhat of a weak argument because you can always construct an example of how something may be helpful for a small group of people.

The relevant question is: How many people who work with databases need to have a lot of experience with SQL? My argument is that while the answer today is "most," the answer in a couple of years might be "very few."

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#193
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?

What's stopping anyone who can run ordinary SQL queries? The LLM just simplifies interaction, it is neither the right tool nor the right place to enforce user rights.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#194
post #186

All these products that pitch about using AI to find insights from your data always end up looking pretty in demos and fall short in reality. This is not because the product is bad, but because there is enormous amount of nuance in DB/Tables that becomes difficult to manage. Most startups evolve too quickly and product teams generally tries to deliver by hacking some existing feature. Columns are added, some columns…

Our theory is we are having simultaneously a bit of a Google moment and a Tableau moment. There is à lot more discovery & work to pull it off, but the dam has been broken. It's been am exciting time to work through with our customers:

* Google moment: AI can now watch and learn how you and your team do data. Around the time Google pagerank came around, the Yahoo-style search engines were highly curated, and the semantic web people were writing xml/rdf schema and manually mapping all data to it. Google replaced slow and expensive work with something easier, higher quality, and more scalable + robust. We are making Louie.ai learn both ahead of time and as the system gets used, so data people can also get their Google moment. Having a tool that works with you & your team here is amazing.

* Tableau moment: A project or data owner can now guide a lot more without much work. Dashboarding used to require a lot of low-level custom web dev etc, while Tableau streamlined it so that a BI lead good at SQL and who understood the data & design can go much further without a big team and in way less time. Understanding the user personas, and adding abstractions for facilitating them, were a big deal for delivery speed, cost, and achieved quality. Arguably the same happened as Looker in introduced LookML and foreshadowed the whole semantic layer movement happening today. To help owners ensure quality and security, we have been investing a lot in the equivalent abstractions in Louie.ai for making data and more conversational. Luckily, while the AI part is new, there is a lot more precedent on the data ops side. Getting this right is a big deal in team settings and basically any time the stakes are high.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#195
post #186

All these products that pitch about using AI to find insights from your data always end up looking pretty in demos and fall short in reality. This is not because the product is bad, but because there is enormous amount of nuance in DB/Tables that becomes difficult to manage. Most startups evolve too quickly and product teams generally tries to deliver by hacking some existing feature. Columns are added, some columns…

Our theory is we are having simultaneously a bit of a Google moment and a Tableau moment. There is à lot more discovery & work to pull it off, but the dam has been broken. It's been am exciting time to work through with our customers: * Google moment: AI can now watch and learn how you and your team do data. Around the time Google pagerank came around, the Yahoo-style search engines were highly curated, and the seman…

Is that right? You do all that at Louie.ai?

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#196
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our theory is we are having simultaneously a bit of a Google moment and a Tableau moment. There is à lot more discovery & work to pull it off, but the dam has been broken. It's been am exciting time to work through with our customers: * Google moment: AI can now watch and learn how you and your team do data. Around the time Google pagerank came around, the Yahoo-style search engines were highly curated, and the seman…

Is that right? You do all that at Louie.ai?

Yep. A lot more on our roadmap, but a lot already in place!

It's been cool seeing how different pieces add up together and how gov/enterprise teams push us. While there are some surprising implementation details, a lot has been following up on what they need with foundational implementations and reusing them. The result is a lot is obvious in retrospect and well-done pieces carry it far.

Ex: We added a secure python sandbox last quarter so analysts can drive richer data wrangling on query results. Except now we are launching a GPU version, both so the wrangling can be ML/AI (ex: auto feature engineering), users can wrangle bigger results (GPU dataframes), and we will move our own built-in agents to it as well (ex: GPU-accelerated dashboard panels). Most individual PRs here are surprisingly small, but opens a lot!

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#197
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that right? You do all that at Louie.ai?

Yep. A lot more on our roadmap, but a lot already in place! It's been cool seeing how different pieces add up together and how gov/enterprise teams push us. While there are some surprising implementation details, a lot has been following up on what they need with foundational implementations and reusing them. The result is a lot is obvious in retrospect and well-done pieces carry it far. Ex: We added a secure python…

as someone building in this space, I am a bit surprised how many concepts you managed to combine in your last sentence. :'D

I will bookmark: ... and we will move our own built-in agents to it as well (ex: GPU-accelerated dashboard panels).

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#198
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. A lot more on our roadmap, but a lot already in place! It's been cool seeing how different pieces add up together and how gov/enterprise teams push us. While there are some surprising implementation details, a lot has been following up on what they need with foundational implementations and reusing them. The result is a lot is obvious in retrospect and well-done pieces carry it far. Ex: We added a secure python…

as someone building in this space, I am a bit surprised how many concepts you managed to combine in your last sentence. :'D I will bookmark: ... and we will move our own built-in agents to it as well (ex: GPU-accelerated dashboard panels).

Those are pretty normal needs for us and our users. A big reason louie.ai exists is to make easier all the years of Graphistry helping enterprise & gov teams use python notebooks, streamlit/databricks/plotly python dashboards, and overall python GPU+graph data science. Think pandas, pytorch, huggingface, Nvidia RAPIDS, our own pygraphistry, etc.

While we can't those years of our lives back, we can make the next ones a lot better!

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think a lot of people tried just asking GPT-3.5 to "Write me full stack web app no bugs please." when it first came out. When it failed to do that they threw up their hands and said "It's just a parrot." Then GPT4 came out, they tried the same thing and got the same results. I keep seeing comments regarding it not being helpful because "super big codebase, doesn't work, it doesn't know the functions and what they d…

I think the main reason people don't do something like this more often is that this turns you from a "coder" to a "manager". Your task now is to serialize the issue and to ask the right questions / keep everything moving along.

I don't particularly mind because I cre more about building something than doing my craft but I can totally see how this will be different for many people.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#200
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can check this out https://www.sqlai.ai . It has AI-powered generators for: - Generate SQL - Generate optimized SQL - Fix query - Optimize query - Explain query Disclaimer: I am the solo developer behind it.

Are all those Twitter testimonials fake? None seem to be actual accounts.

I bet even their Site design is AI generated...
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