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Getting AI to write good SQL

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Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#281

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

mykowebhn wrote: post #199

I understand from a technical POV how this could be considered great news. But I don't see how this is good news at all from a societal POV. The last 15 or so years has seen an unprecedented rise in salaries for engineers, especially software engineers. This has brought an interest in the profession from people who would normally not have considered SW as a profession. I think this is both good and bad. It has brough…

It's better for society to get much wealthier, much faster, by opening up the possibility for anyone to do advanced programming, than for a small class of anointed and studied elites to get rich via this exclusion. It's the opposite of sad. It's the best thing that ever happened for the productive use of a computer by a layperson since the invention of the search engine.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#282

Post by Workaccount2 »

scuol wrote: post #122
koakuma-chan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Gemini is free.

Well, as with many of Google's services, you pay with your data. Pay-as-you-go with Gemini does not snort your data for their own purposes (allegedly...).

The cost to google lying about data privacy far exceeds the profit gained from using it. Alienate your most valuable customers (enterprise) so you can get 10% more training data? And almost certainly end up in a sea of lawsuits from them?

Not happening. Investors would riot.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#283

Post by sgarland »

pcblues wrote: post #249

A question: Does anyone know how well AI does generating performative SQL in years-old production databases? In terms of speed of execution, locking, accuracy, etc.? I see the promise for green-field projects.

It's very hit or miss. Claude does OK-ish, others less so. You have to explicitly state the DB and version, otherwise it will assume you have access to functions / features that may not exist. Even then, they'll often make subtle mistakes that you're not going to catch unless you already have good knowledge of your RDBMS. For example, at my work we're currently doing query review, and devs have created an AI recommendation script to aid in this. It recommended that we create a composite index on something like `(user_id, id)` for a query. We have MySQL. If you don't know (the AI didn't, clearly), MySQL implicitly has a copy of the PK in every secondary index, so while it would quite happily make that index for you, it would end up being `(user_id, id, id)` and would thus be 3x the size it needed to be.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#284

Post by [deleted] »

reacharavindh wrote: post #197
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #26

Can I just say that Google AI Studio with latest Gemini is stunningly, amazingly, game changingly impressive. It leaves Claude and ChatGPT's coding looking like they are from a different century. It's hard to believe these changes are coming in factors of weeks and months. Last month i could not believe how good Claude is. Today I'm not sure how I could continue programming without Google Gemini in my toolkit. Gemini…

I use Gemini2.5 Pro through work and it is excellent. However, I use Claude 3.7 Sonnet via API for personal use using money added to their account. I couldn’t find a way to use Gemini like a prepaid plan. I ain’t giving my credit card to Google for an LLM that can easily charge me hundreds or thousands of EUR.

[deleted]

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#285

Post by neRok »

pcblues wrote: post #246

Can someone please answer these questions because I still think AI stinks of a false promise of determinable accuracy: Do you need an expert to verify if the answer from AI is correct? How is it time saved refining prompts instead of SQL? Is it typing time? How can you know the results are correct if you aren't able to do it yourself? Why should a junior (sorcerer's apprentice) be trusted in charge of using AI? No ma…

I've recently started asking the free version of chat-gpt questions on how I might do various things, and it's working great for me - but also my questions come from a POV of having existing "domain knowledge".

So for example, I was mucking around with ffmpeg and mkv files, and instead of searching for the answer to my thought-bubble (which I doubt would have been "quick" or "productive" on google), I straight up asked it what I wanted to know;

  > are there any features for mkv files like what ffmpeg does when making mp4 files with the option `--movflags faststart`?
And it gave me a great answer!

  (...the answer happened to be based upon our prior conversation of av1 encoding, and so it told me about increasing the I-frame frequency).
Another example from today - I was trying to build mp4v2 but ran in to drama because I don't want to take the easy road and install all the programs needed to "build" (I've taken to doing my hobby-coding as if I'm on a corporate-PC without admin rights (windows)). I also don't know about "cmake" and stuff, but I went and downloaded the portable zip and moved the exe to my `%user-path%/tools/` folder, but it gave an error. I did a quick search, but the google results were grim, so I went to chat-gpt. I said;

  > I'm trying to build this project off github, but I don't have cmake installed because I can't, so I'm using a portable version. It's giving me this error though: [*error*]
And the aforementioned error was pretty generic, but chat-gpt still gave a fantastic response along the lines of;

  >  Ok, first off, you must not have all the files that cmake.exe needs in the same folder, so to fix do ..[stuff, including explicit powershell commands to set PATH variables, as I had told it I was using powershell before].
  >  And once cmake is fixed, you still need [this and that].
  >  For [this], and because you want portable, here's how to setup Ninja [...]
  >  For [that], and even though you said you dont want to install things, you might consider ..[MSVC instructions].
  >  If not, you can ..[mingw-w64 instructions].

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#286

Post by Workaccount2 »

belter wrote: post #263
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #26

Can I just say that Google AI Studio with latest Gemini is stunningly, amazingly, game changingly impressive. It leaves Claude and ChatGPT's coding looking like they are from a different century. It's hard to believe these changes are coming in factors of weeks and months. Last month i could not believe how good Claude is. Today I'm not sure how I could continue programming without Google Gemini in my toolkit. Gemini…

> Gemini AI Studio is such a giant leap ahead in programming I have to pinch myself when I'm using it Every time in the last three or four weeks, there is a post here about Gemini, the top comment, or one of the top comments is something along these lines. And every time I spend a few minutes making empirical tests to check if I made a mistake in cancelling my paid Gemini account after giving up on it... So I just di…

Can you share the prompts?

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#287

Post by karencarits »

__loam wrote: post #186
karencarits wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult to assess how typical your experience is; I tried your initial prompt (`Write me a simple todo app on cloudflare with auth0 authentication.` on gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06) and didn't get any mentions of @auth0-cloudfare, although I cannot verify if the answer is working as-is https://pastebin.com/yfg0Zn0u

Shocked you got a different output from the stochastic token generator.

That's not the point. While there is a temperature setting and randomness involved, you can still benchmark and experience significant differences in the output between models and generations. I thus provided more details and the full output to make it easier for people to assess the context of the comment I replied to

When someone uses the same tools as I do but seem to experience problems I do not have - these kind of posts often describes how bad LLMs are or how bad Google search is - I get a bit confused. Is it A/B testing going on? Am I just lucky? Am I inattentive to these weaknesses? Is it about promoting? Or what areas we work in? Do we actually use the same tools (i.e., same models)?

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#288

Post by sgarland »

strict9 wrote: post #98
AdrianB1 wrote: post #21

In real life I find using AI for SQL dangerous. It allows people that don't know what they do to write queries that can significantly impact servers. In my world databases are relatively big for most developers, but not huge. Sometimes when I want to fine tune a query I am challenging AI to provide a better solution. I give it the already optimized query and I ask for better. I never got a better answer, sometimes be…

It should never be at the point where some random person can impact a server. That's what read replicas with read-only access are for. Production db servers should not be open to random queries and usage by people. That's only for the app to use.

Unless you have a much more regimented code review process than anywhere I've seen, "a random person" can impact prod quite easily by introducing a bad query into the app. Since ORMs are rampant, it's probably heavily obfuscated to begin with, so they won't even see the raw SQL. At best, they'll have run it on stage, where the DB size is probably so tiny that its performance issues go unnoticed.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#289

Post by tough »

layer8 wrote: post #256
widdershins wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Testing something is the best way to prove that it behaves correctly in all the cases you can think of. Relying on your own (fallible) understanding is dangerous. Of course, there may be cases you didn't think of where it behaves incorrectly. But if that's true, you're just as likely to forget those cases when studying the expression to see "what it actually says". If you have tests, fixing a broken case (once you di…

I don’t believe this is true. That’s why we do mathematical proofs, instead of only testing all the cases one can think of. It’s important to sanity-check one’s understanding with tests, but mere black-box testing is no substitute for the understanding.

Code is not perfect like math imho

libraries some times make weird choices

in theory theory and practice are the same, in practice not really

in the context of regex, you have to know which dialect and programming language version of regex you’re targeting for example. its not really universal how all libs/languages works

thus the need to test

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#290

Post by eqvinox »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #281
mykowebhn wrote: post #199

I understand from a technical POV how this could be considered great news. But I don't see how this is good news at all from a societal POV. The last 15 or so years has seen an unprecedented rise in salaries for engineers, especially software engineers. This has brought an interest in the profession from people who would normally not have considered SW as a profession. I think this is both good and bad. It has brough…

It's better for society to get much wealthier, much faster, by opening up the possibility for anyone to do advanced programming, than for a small class of anointed and studied elites to get rich via this exclusion. It's the opposite of sad. It's the best thing that ever happened for the productive use of a computer by a layperson since the invention of the search engine.

Sure, but this isn't "anyone" doing advanced programming, it's the LLM doing it. The humans get skill in using LLM, not programming, and whether this new skill will make anyone wealthy is an open question.

(Also, just by market logic, rare skills in demand are always paid more; I'm not sure why you're calling it an "exclusion". The education system in a lot of places might have that function, but that's a separate issue not helped by LLMs writing SQL?)

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