Text-to-SQL

In the era of Big Data, data has become an organization’s most valuable asset. However, access to it is often limited by a technical barrier: the need to use query languages like SQL. For years, analysts and engineers have dreamed of a system that would allow them to “talk” to a database in natural language. Text-to-SQL systems aim to realize this vision, but their path has been challenging. Older models, though promising, often failed in real-world scenarios: they were “brittle,” struggled with unseen database schemas, and required costly fine-tuning for each new domain. ...

The text-to-SQL task involves converting natural language questions into executable SQL queries on a relational database. While modern large language models (LLMs) excel at many generative tasks, generating correct and complex SQL queries remains challenging. In the paper RetrySQL: text-to-SQL training with retry data for self-correcting query generation, the authors introduce a training paradigm that teaches the model to self-monitor and correct its reasoning steps during generation, rather than relying solely on post-processing modules. ...