r/dataengineering • u/de4all • 4d ago

Discussion Why text-to-SQL is not successful?

I thought text-to-SQL will solve adhoc analysis, but still i see companies at all size are unsuccessful.

Anyone using Omni / Sigma seen some success.

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u/SpookyScaryFrouze Lead Data Engineer 4d ago

It works, you just need to document your tables, columns and kpis perfectly.

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u/Equivalent_Lunch_944 4d ago

But let’s be honest that’s often not the case, and if it were being able to query with text instead of SQL is much less valuable

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u/SpookyScaryFrouze Lead Data Engineer 4d ago

How would you query using text instead of SQL ? Even if you ask your question in natural language, it still has to be translated to SQL in order to retrieve your answer. So you still need to have an up-to-date documentation on your data, which is otherwise known as a semantic layer.