Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting AI to write good SQL

cloud.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 379 posts

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#91

Post by levocardia »

In one of Stephen Boyd's lectures on convex optimization, he has some quip like "if your optimization problem is computationally intractable, you could try really hard to improve the algorithm, or you could just go on vacation for a few weeks and by the time you get back, computers will be fast enough to solve it."

I feel like that's actually true now with LLMs -- if some query I write doesn't get one-shotted, I don't bother with a galaxy-brain prompt; I just shelve it 'til next month and the next big OpenAI/Anthropic/Google model will usually crush it.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#92

Post by cjbgkagh »

cheema33 wrote: post #53
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…

> I give it the already optimized query and I ask for better. I never got a better answer.. This was my experience as well. However I have observed that things have been improving this regard. Newer LLMs do perform much better. And I suspect they will continue to get better over time.

I’ve been working on highly optimized code that heavily uses CPU intrinsics, a year ago no chance, 6 months ago a helpful reference, today it’s a good starting point. That is an insane pace of improvement.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#94

Post by crystal_revenge »

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 personally didn’t really understand how to write regex until I understood “regular languages” properly, then it was obvious.

I’ve found that the vast majority of programmers today do not have any foundation in formal languages and/or the theory of computation (something that 10 years ago was pretty common to assume).

It used to be pretty safe to assume that everyone from perl hackers to computer science theorists understood regex pretty well, but I’ve found it’s increasingly a rare skill. While it used to be common for all programmers to understand these things, even people with a CS background view that as some annoying course they forgot as soon as the exam was over.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#95

Post by scarface_74 »

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 allows people that don't know what they do to write queries that can significantly impact servers.

At least for the only OLAP DB I use often - Amazon Redshift - that’s a solved problem with Workload Management Queues. You can restrict those users ability to consume too many resources.

For queries that are used for OLTP, I usually try to keep those queries relatively simple. If there is a reason for read queries that consume resources , those go to read replicas when strong consistently isn’t required

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#96

Post by koakuma-chan »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #39
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 lev…

And Gemini is free.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#97

Post by fooker »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #64
antman wrote: post #52

This is on howto to to write good SELECTS, not SQL. AI is good enough to also create schemas from spec, migrate, explore databases, testing etc which tgis article does not touch upon

Every time I've fed more than 5 migration files and asked Claude to make multiple across those files it fails, it does very badly in almost all cases, even on kinda basic schemas. I actually don't think LLMs grok complex migration files or sql that well at all.

Well that's a great startup idea if you're familiar with the domain.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#98

Post by strict9 »

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.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#99

Post by emmelaich »

flysand7 wrote: post #11
mousetree wrote: post #6

Out of all the AI tools and models I’ve tried, the most disappointing is the Gemini built into BigQuery. Despite having well named columns with good descriptions it consistently gets nowhere close to solving the problem.

Having written more SQL than any other programming language by now, every time I've tried to use AI to write the query for me, I'd spend way more time getting the output right than if I'd just written it myself. As a quick aside there's one thing I wish SQL had that would make writing queries so much faster. At work we're using a DSL that has one operator that automatically generates joins from foreign key columns, j…

I'd like there to be a function or macro for a bunch of joins, say

    DEFINE products_by_order AS orders o JOIN order_items oi ON o.order_id = oi.order_id JOIN products p ON oi.product_id = p.product_id
You could make it visible to the DB rather than just a macro so it could optimise it by caching etc. Sort of like a view but on demand.

Re: Getting AI to write good SQL

#100

Post by emmelaich »

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…

There's often a bunch of edge cases that people overlook. And you also get quadratic behaviour for some fairly 'simple' looking regexes that few people seem aware of.
Post reply on HN