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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like by the time I could turn it into a product, Microsoft & friends will release something that makes it look like a joke. If there is no one on the SQL Server team working on this right now, I don't know what the hell their leadership is thinking.

I am not chasing this rabbit. Someone else will almost certainly catch it first. For now, this is a fun toy I enjoy in my free time. The moment I try to make money with it the fun begins to disappear.

Broadly speaking, I do think this is approximately the only thing that matters once you realize you can put pretty much anything in a big SQL database. What happens when 100% of the domain is in-scope of an LLM that has iteratively optimized itself against the schema?

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There’s daylight between personal toolsmithing and a VC-backed startup (both are fun sometimes and a grind sometimes).

I’m getting together a bunch of related-sounding stuff in terms of integrating modern models into my workflow to polish up a bit and release MIT.

If you’d like to have a hand tidying it up a little and integrating it with e.g. editors and stuff, I think the bundle would be a lot cooler for it!

Microsoft may well catch the rabbit that queries schemas and generates valid SQL.

But that rabbit can't understand the meaning of the data just by looking at column names and table relationships.

Let's say you want to know how sales and inventory are doing compared to last year at your chain of retail stores.

Will Microsoft's rabbit be smart enough to know that the retail business is seasonal, so it must compare the last x weeks this year with the same weeks last year? And account for differences in timing of holidays? And exclude stores that weren't open last year?

Will it know that inventory is a stock and sales is a flow, so while it can sum daily sales, it's nonsensical to sum daily inventory?

The real AI magic isn't generating SQL with four joins, it's understanding the mechanics of each industry and the quirks of your organization to extract the intent from ambiguous and incomplete natural language.

If I can TLDR your comment, which I agree with: the real value is in doing real work.

“Hustlers” burn countless hours trying to “optimize” work out of the picture.

Historically, there’s a lot of money in just sitting down with a to-do list of customer problems and solving them at acceptable cost, come hell or high water.

I will be extremely surprised if Microsoft build this for open source databases, however someone else will definitely build it if you don't, that is completely true :-)

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on Postgres related open source tools (Citus & PgBouncer mostly)

Microsoft is heavily investing in Postgres and its ecosystem, so I wouldn't be extremely surprised if we would do this. We're definitely building things to combine AI with Postgres[1]. Although afaik no-one is working actively on query generation using AI.

But I actually did a very basic POC of "natural language queries" in Postgres myself last year:

Conference talk about it: https://youtu.be/g8lzx0BABf0?si=LM0c6zTt8_P1urYC Repo (unmaintained): https://github.com/JelteF/pg_human

1: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-po...

Supabase already has an AI feature which queries your database for you [0]

[0]: https://supabase.com/blog/studio-introducing-assistant

Postgres is dear to me. Met its founders when I was in college at Berkeley, worked heavily with it at a previous company around 2015, used it for all my own projects. I'm glad to see it getting more attention lately (seemingly).

Microsoft owns Citus, a very major Postgres plugin.

I didn’t know this, it seems they love open source even thought they have competing commercial products. Maybe there is just more money is selling cloud than there is in selling commercial databases?

You can just make a GitHub repo with what you have. It'd still be valuable to the community

Would you be willing to share your prompts? I bet a lot of people would find them useful!

> I feel like by the time I could turn it into a product, Microsoft & friends will release something that makes it look like a joke. If there is no one on the SQL Server team working on this right now, I don't know what the hell their leadership is thinking.

If Cortana for Azure isn't a thing in the works, I *really* don't know what the hell their leadership is working on. I could see insane value in "why is my website slow?" and getting actionable responses.

If the do release it , they will only release it for enterprise. Many many sql server installs are sql server standard. There is an entire ecosystem of companies built on selling packages that support sql server standard, wee DevArt, RedGate.

> Microsoft & friends will release something that makes it look like a joke

True, Microsoft & Friends have gotten greedy every passing year. Before they used to develop the platform (OS,DB etc.,) and let others develop and sell apps on it that would benefit them as well as the whole ecosystem.

Now they want every last dollar they can squeeze out of the ecosystem. So they don't leave any stone unturned and they have big pockets to do that.

Wouldn't it be pretty fast to make it as a chatgpt?

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