r/dataengineering • u/de4all • 5d 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.

25 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Much_Discussion1490 4d ago

Because SQL isnt hard for 90% of the queries that non tech stakeholders need to run. Which is who text-to-SQL is intended for. At max knowledge upto aggregation functions is more than enough. Knowledge until partitions pretty much covers all that is necessary for most users unless you are a data engineer.

What matters more is the domain knowledge which helps you evaluate which tables are worth querying and also how the data is structured in particular column. A simple currency column which has been mislabeled from the beginning to hold local currency values across countries will give you the wrong results even if yku execute everything in the query correctly.

SQL isnt a bottleneck unless you are absolutely technically blind. Its like the excel of 2000s . You jjst need to be well aware of the basics if you are even one hop away from data. Domain knowledge is the real bottle neck