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Getting AI to write good SQL

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Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#31

Post by insin »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #22
nashashmi wrote: post #12

AI text to regex solutions would be incredibly handy.

This comment appears frequently and always surprises me. Do people just... not know regex? It seems so foreign to me. It's not like it's some obscure thing, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Relatively speaking it's not very complicated, it's widely documented, has vast learning resources, and has some of the best ROI of any DSL. It's funny to joke that it looks like line noise, but really, there is not a lot to learn to u…

IME it's not just longer, but also more difficult to tell the LLM precisely what you want than to write it yourself if you need a somewhat novel RegExp, which won't be all over the training data.

I needed one to do something with Markdown which was a very internal BigCo thing to need to do, something I'd never have written without weird requirements in play. It wasn't that tricky, but going back trying to get LLMs to replicate it after the fact from the same description I was working from, they were hopeless. I need to dig that out again and try it on the latest models.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#32

Post by insin »

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…

Is it just me or did they turn off reasoning mode in free Gemini Pro this week?

It's pretty useful as long as you hold it back from writing code too early, or too generally, or sometimes at all. It's a chronic over-writer of code, too. Ignoring most of what it attempts to write and using it to explore the design space without ever getting bogged down in code and other implementation details is great though.

I've been doing something that's new to me but is going to be all over the training data (subscription service using stripe) and have often been able to pivot the planned design of different aspects before writing a single line of code because I can get all the data it already has regurgitated in the context of my particular tech stack and use case.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#33

Post by awesome_dude »

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…

Mate, IME programmers who don't know what they are doing just do it anyways then look to blame someone/something else if things turn to custard.

AI is just increasing the frequency of things turning to custard :)

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#34

Post by eddd-ddde »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #22
nashashmi wrote: post #12

AI text to regex solutions would be incredibly handy.

This comment appears frequently and always surprises me. Do people just... not know regex? It seems so foreign to me. It's not like it's some obscure thing, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Relatively speaking it's not very complicated, it's widely documented, has vast learning resources, and has some of the best ROI of any DSL. It's funny to joke that it looks like line noise, but really, there is not a lot to learn to u…

I know regex. But I use it so sparingly that every time I need it I forgot again the character for word boundary, or the character for whitespace, or the exact incantation for negative lookahead. Is it >!? who knows.

A shortcut to type in natural language and get something I can validate in seconds is really useful.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#35

Post by rectang »

> We will cover state-of-the-art [...] how we approach techniques that allows the system to offer virtually certified correct answers.

I don't need AI to generate perfect SQL, because I am never going to trust the output enough to copy/paste it — the risk of subtle semantic errors is too high, even if the code validates.

Instead, I find it helpful for AI to suggest approaches — after which I will manually craft the SQL, starting from scratch.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#36

Post by layer8 »

richardw wrote: post #28
tango12 wrote: post #17

What’s the eventual goal of text to sql? Is it to build a copilot for a data analyst or to get business insight without going through an analyst? If it’s the latter - then imho no amount of text to sql sophistication will solve the problem because it’s impossible for a non analyst to understand if the sql is correct or sufficient. These don’t seem like text2sql problems: > Why did we hit only 80% of our daily ecommme…

Any algo that a human would follow can be built and tested. If you have 10 analysts you have 10 different skill levels, with differing understanding of the database and business context. So automation gives you a platform to achieve a floor of skill and knowledge. The humans can now be “at least this good or better”. A new analyst instantly gets better, faster. I assume a useful goal would be to guide development of…

But “text to sql” isn’t an algorithm.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#37

Post by stefap2 »

I have done this using the OpenAI 4o model. I had to pass in a prompt with business-specific instructions, industry jargon, and descriptions of tables, including foreign keys. Then it would generate even complex join queries and return data. In my case, I was more interested in providing results to users not knowledgeable about SQL, but the SQL was displayed for information.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#38

Post by CuriouslyC »

insin wrote: post #32
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…

Is it just me or did they turn off reasoning mode in free Gemini Pro this week? It's pretty useful as long as you hold it back from writing code too early, or too generally, or sometimes at all. It's a chronic over-writer of code, too. Ignoring most of what it attempts to write and using it to explore the design space without ever getting bogged down in code and other implementation details is great though. I've been…

I think reasoning in the studio is gated by load, and at the same time I wasn't seeing so much reasoning in AIstudio, I was getting vertex service overloaded calls pretty frequently on my agents.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#39

Post by CuriouslyC »

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'm really surprised more people haven't caught on. Claude can one shot small stuff of similar complexity, but as soon as you start to really push the model into longer, more involved use cases Gemini pulls way ahead. The context handling is so impressive, in addition to using it for coding agents, I use Gemini as a beta reader for a fairly long manuscript (~85k words) and it absolutely nails it, providing a high level report that's comparable to what a solid human beta reader would provide in seconds.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#40

Post by layer8 »

eddd-ddde wrote: post #34
RadiozRadioz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment appears frequently and always surprises me. Do people just... not know regex? It seems so foreign to me. It's not like it's some obscure thing, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Relatively speaking it's not very complicated, it's widely documented, has vast learning resources, and has some of the best ROI of any DSL. It's funny to joke that it looks like line noise, but really, there is not a lot to learn to u…

I know regex. But I use it so sparingly that every time I need it I forgot again the character for word boundary, or the character for whitespace, or the exact incantation for negative lookahead. Is it >!? who knows. A shortcut to type in natural language and get something I can validate in seconds is really useful.

How do you validate it if you don’t know the syntax? Or are you saying that looking up syntax –> semantics is significantly quicker than semantics –> syntax? Which I don’t find to be the case. What takes time is grokking the semantics in context, which you have to do in both cases.
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