Show HN: Natural Language to SQL interface to embed in your app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Natural Language to SQL interface to embed in your app

kueri.me

44 pointsdavidsQL25 comments

This isn't something you'd expose to your end users right? It seems more targeted for in house analysts.

If that's the case, why would one want to use this vs. having analysts use (or learn) SQL? Typing "Who's the highest paid employee?" looks cool but the equivalent SQL is simple as well. I'm not sure I could necessarily express a more complicated example in a natural language, and even if I could, it wouldn't feel natural.

I see two use cases.

1. Give non-technical people a way to answer their own questions using data in a database which would free up analyst time.

2. Give analysts a way to quickly answer a question and they only have to go to SQL for more complicated questions. It is faster for me to type "who is the highest paid employee" than the equivalent SQL even though the SQL is trivial because I don't have to look up the schema and my fingers are better at typing an English sentence than a SQL query.

Hey koolba,

Most external users do not know how to code SQL (as well as some SQL developers... hehe). The ability to ask questions in various formats delivers an easy and simple UX.

Use cases include: online banking and credit accounts, Human Resources recruitment staff, executive level officers who have ad-hoc spur of the moment questions, warehouse managers at IKEA.... and the list goes on.

Here are a couple of interesting questions we have encountered in the past: 1. What is the average transaction sum for deals completed in June 2. Who are the top 5 employees with the best salary to sales ratio?

please make the "click here" to experience a demo MUCH more prominent. You're losing out on people playing around with the interface because it's not in plain sight.

Are you referring to the Easy Explorer at the download page?

That is correct. It is among the super-biggest-huge no-nos to give end users direct access to a d.b. in any form like this.

Even if this has zero bugs and so will never need to change and there are zero security issues and it is sufficiently usable for the end users purposes, just you wait until you need to change the db schema and some user created a report for the ceo based o this and never told anyone about it and now the report is broke and the ceo and cfo are breathing down your neck to "fix it now" because they have a meeti g and need these number (which, now that you are looking at these numbers, they don't even match the numbers in hour db because they derived some of the metrics themselves from raw data rather than using the metric fields from the db, but they did it wrong, so even if you "fix it" you have to break the news that it's still broken and shouldn't be used for their meeting...)

So, correct, this should not be a thing for end users in many cases.

I want to know from the moderators if it is allowed to post the same link on Show HN 3 times per week until it gains a considerable amount of interest, because if that is the rule I have a lot of tools and services I want to publicize, but haven't posted here that much.

I actually care about the quality of the posts here and don't want to turn Show HN into a spam bin, but if other people are allowed to do that, maybe I should use it for self-promotion too, before it is gone forever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=davidsQL

Are natural language interfaces for databases commonly used in the industry? Sorry if that sounds hostile, I'm simply curious about the state of a field which doesn't seem very prevalent outside of academia.

The Natural Language trend is on the rise over multiple domains. From large corporations like Microsoft, IBM and Wolfram Alpha, to small startup companies like Looker, Statemuse or AnswerRocket - companies are taking a shot at achieving the ultimate User Experience of Natural Language over databases. Solutions differ in two major ways: UX Approach and Solution model.

In the UX approach department, Kueri.me has taken a real-time auto-complete suggestion mode which helpos users construct their questions properly thus enhancing the valid question ratio. In addition, Kueri is available as a complete platform for on premises development where as other solutions are cloud based services.

Great idea, looking forward to the demo working

The DEMO is now up! http://kueri.me/demo

Is the live demo broken? Nothing seems to happen when submitting a query?

Hey pmx.

We are having some difficulties with the online demo at the moment. We are working on it and it should be up soon! You can download the SDK and play with it, we would be here to support your every step.

And more details,info and videos can be found here: http://docs.kueri.me

If you're curious, I found that you can look at the xmlrpc responses and see what it's sending back. Seems like whatever client side code they have is failing to convert those responses into an html table or whatnot.

From what I can tell, it does seem to be doing something ;)

I had a similar idea a couple of months ago, glad someone has built it. Would love to see some more example queries and answers on the site, probably on the front page

Thanks for the feedback.

THE DEMO IS NOW UP.

Sorry for the inconvenience, you can access the DEMO here: http://kueri.me/demo

It reminds me of the "Assistant" feature of Q&A (which used Siri's predecessor as an NLP engine).

I'm here to answer any question you might have.

Clicking the 'Live demo' button is giving an empty page.

Hey,

I'm taking care of it right now and let you know when it's up again. At the moment you can check our "Tour" page to learn more, and download.

Hi-- What is the business model you have? I've seen "free" prominently, but I'm sure there has to be a revenue plan in here somewhere given how the website is constructed.

Nice simple UX, looks great.

Glad you liked it :)

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