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Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

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Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#81

Post by MattGaiser »

pylua wrote: post #72
codegeek wrote: post #64

I have been keeping track of a few products like these including some that are YC backed. Interesting space as I am looking for a solution myself: - Minds DB (YC W20) https://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb - Buster (YC W24) https://buster.so - DB Pilot https://dbpilot.io and now this one

I don’t fully understand the use of business case after reading the documentation. Is it really a time save?

It would be for people who are not that fluent in SQL. Even as a dev, I find ChatGPT to be easier for writing queries than hand coding them as I do it so infrequently.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#82

Post by marginalia_nu »

miohtama wrote: post #79

How about instead of making AI wrappers to over 50 years old SQL, we’d make a database query language that’s easier to read an write?

In general, if something has been around for a very long time and nobody apparently seems to have thought to improve it, then odds are the reason is it's pretty good and genuinely hard to improve on.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#83

Post by pylua »

MattGaiser wrote: post #81
pylua wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t fully understand the use of business case after reading the documentation. Is it really a time save?

It would be for people who are not that fluent in SQL. Even as a dev, I find ChatGPT to be easier for writing queries than hand coding them as I do it so infrequently.

Yeah, same here. Seems like that approach is much simpler than this.

I guess the real benefit here is that you don’t need to understand the schemas so the knowledge is not lost when someone leaves a company.

Sort of an abstraction layer for the schemas

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#84

Post by refset »

codegeek wrote: post #64

I have been keeping track of a few products like these including some that are YC backed. Interesting space as I am looking for a solution myself: - Minds DB (YC W20) https://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb - Buster (YC W24) https://buster.so - DB Pilot https://dbpilot.io and now this one

It's not a public facing product, but there was a talk from a team at Alibaba a couple of months ago during CMU's "ML⇄DB Seminar Series" [0] on how they augmented their NL2SQL transformer model with "Semantics Correction [...] a post-processing routine, which checks the initially generated SQL queries by applying rules to identify and correct semantic errors" [1]. It will be interesting to see whether VC-backed teams can keep up with the state of the art coming out of BigCorps.

[0] "Alibaba: Domain Knowledge Augmented AI for Databases (Jian Tan)" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsgHthzROj4&list=PLSE8ODhjZX...

[1] "CatSQL: Towards Real World Natural Language to SQL Applications" - https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p1534-fu.pdf

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#85

Post by neodymiumphish »

miohtama wrote: post #79

How about instead of making AI wrappers to over 50 years old SQL, we’d make a database query language that’s easier to read an write?

My fear with this approach is that the first implementation would be severely handicapped compared to SQL, amd it'd take years to support some one-off need for any organizational user, so it'd never be fully utilized.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#86

Post by aae42 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #82
miohtama wrote: post #79

How about instead of making AI wrappers to over 50 years old SQL, we’d make a database query language that’s easier to read an write?

In general, if something has been around for a very long time and nobody apparently seems to have thought to improve it, then odds are the reason is it's pretty good and genuinely hard to improve on.

in other words, SQL is a shark, not a dinosaur

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#89

Post by kulikalov »

While I recognize the efforts in developing natural language to SQL translation systems, I remain skeptical. The core of my concern lies in the inherent nature of natural language and these models, which are approximative and lack precision. SQL databases, on the other hand, are built to handle precise, accurate information in most cases. Introducing an approximative layer, such as a language model, into a system that relies on precision could potentially create more problems than it solves, leading me to question the productivity of these endeavors in effectively addressing real-world needs.

Re: Vanna.ai: Chat with your SQL database

#90

Post by kszucs »

codegeek wrote: post #64

I have been keeping track of a few products like these including some that are YC backed. Interesting space as I am looking for a solution myself: - Minds DB (YC W20) https://github.com/mindsdb/mindsdb - Buster (YC W24) https://buster.so - DB Pilot https://dbpilot.io and now this one

Please add Ibis Birdbrain https://ibis-project.github.io/ibis-birdbrain/ to the list. Birdbrain is an AI-powered data bot, built on Ibis and Marvin, supporting more than 18 database backends.

See https://github.com/ibis-project/ibis and https://ibis-project.org for more details.

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