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Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

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Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#41

Post by adrianN »

ep103 wrote: post #30
jeltz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is an issue a friend of mine has right now with his team. He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background (or really much programming background either). And one of his main frustrations is that the analysts do not understand the data model or the business. Before he became their manager his team just took report requests and then wrote some SQL and delivered s…

Clearly, the correct move here is to replace the entire team with Looker and let every department head create their own dashboards to track arbitrary kpis with no understanding of the product or underlying data model. /s

The correct move seems to be to replace the team with a set of oracle bones. From the very limited information we have it seems to me like the team was used to justify whatever conclusions were already made before consulting them.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#42

Post by LegitShady »

jeltz wrote: post #24
berkle4455 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just described most SQL analysts I've worked with

Yeah, that is an issue a friend of mine has right now with his team. He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background (or really much programming background either). And one of his main frustrations is that the analysts do not understand the data model or the business. Before he became their manager his team just took report requests and then wrote some SQL and delivered s…

the larger the company the worse this becomes. When you hit mega level like government the IT side barely knows what the business does and has no idea what anything means. If you're lucky they may know how to support your application from completely failing. If you need any major development you need to compete against everyone else in the government for IT resources.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#43

Post by uoaei »

mgdev wrote: post #31
jeltz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is an issue a friend of mine has right now with his team. He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background (or really much programming background either). And one of his main frustrations is that the analysts do not understand the data model or the business. Before he became their manager his team just took report requests and then wrote some SQL and delivered s…

> He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background I assure you, it wasn't random. It was punitive. ;)

Honest question: how rampant is this kind of bullshit politicking in tech companies, and how does this differ with industry, size, company age, etc.? My friends who have worked at big names like F and T have described the cultures there as following: "it's as if everyone who studied too much in high school and college missed all the parties and bullshit, so they're making up for it 'on campus' here". And the stories from folks at G are not really better, though allegedly they tend to exercise politics more in the quiet-sabotage style. I feel like I'm describing races from Star Trek, company cultures are weird.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#44

Post by ryanjshaw »

arrosenberg wrote: post #9

You didn't replace a SQL Analyst, you just gave them a query generator. End data consumers don't understand the data model, assumptions, quirks, etc. If they fire the analyst, they are going to wind up drawing a lot of bad conclusions on anything more complicated than simple aggregations.

Maybe 5% of the business/operations people I've worked with would even want to do this. The rest prefer a smart human to walk them through building a report - most of the time this is because they don't actually know what they need, and they actually need an expert to sit down and figure it out with them.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#45

Post by tragomaskhalos »

Anyone who's been asked more than a couple of times for data that requires a non-trivial bit of ad-hoc SQL will know the sinking "oh shit" feeling that comes when you subsequently realise you borked the query logic in some subtle way and have accordingly emailed out a completely bogus answer/report.

From the article it doesn't seem that GPT is significantly better or worse than a human in this regard, although an experienced analyst would over time decrease their number of such errors.

The best fix imo is to slather a battery of views over your data to minimise the risk of getting the joins wrong, and it'd be interesting to see how that approach could improve the bot's quality.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#46

Post by knodi123 »

LeanderK wrote: post #26

I love those ChatGPT projects! Of course it's silly and nobody is really replacing somebody with a program that confidently get half it's answers wrong. But it's fun to just naively let ChatGPT solve the problem. But I wonder what it's going to look like in a few years. Currently, it's really just a demo that got surprisingly huge traction. I think the most pressing problem is not to get ChatGPT smarter but to get it…

> nobody is really replacing somebody with a program that confidently get half it's answers wrong

I gotta tell you, I use copilot to help with my coding, and it still sends a shiver down my spine when it writes the entire database migration based off of the filename, or writes 4 pages of automated tests that work right on the first try.

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#47

Post by randomdata »

dmitriid wrote: post #11
logicallee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my opinion: probably will work for harder queries, because GPT is a form of general intelligence. (At least ChatGPT is. It is a much more advanced form of intelligence than davinci-003, which the poster used.)

It's not even close to being a form of general intelligence. It's an advanced language model trained on a large set of data. It gets confused for even the simplest of things, especially code. You can trick it into working more-or-less correctly on simple sets and simple tasks, but in the wrong run it will be more wrong than correct.

Should we ever unlock the magic of the human brain and be able to describe it mathematically, will it still be considered general intelligence or will it just be a trained on a large set of data?

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#48

Post by shubb »

ep103 wrote: post #30
jeltz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is an issue a friend of mine has right now with his team. He randomly ended up as the manger of the data analytics team despite no analytics background (or really much programming background either). And one of his main frustrations is that the analysts do not understand the data model or the business. Before he became their manager his team just took report requests and then wrote some SQL and delivered s…

Clearly, the correct move here is to replace the entire team with Looker and let every department head create their own dashboards to track arbitrary kpis with no understanding of the product or underlying data model. /s

Who needs a data model when you can just dump a bunch of excel sheets and database dumps in a shared folder, call it a data lake, and encourage anyone who has a report to just throw it together in the free version of power bi?

Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

#49

Post by ellisv »

davinci-003, ChatGPT, and others can be great tools. But they often give you exactly what you ask for (or at least try to) and a large part of writing SQL queries for analytics is figuring out what wasn't asked for but should have been. Good analysts will find outliers, data-smells, and ask questions rather than rush to returning an answer.
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