Hacker News Reader

Comment by saigal | Hacker News Reader

allow me to clarify.. Dataherald isn't intended for developers because they don't know SQL, it's intended for developers who want to build text to SQL into their products

View on HN

But who wants text-to-sql in products that they use? You wouldn't be able to trust the results. So what is it useful for? Of course you could learn to check the output. But then you could just learn SQL. I know dozens of not particularly technical people (certainly not software developers) who have learnt enough SQL to be useful over a couple of days.

While the engine response is not accurate all the time, the engine returns a confidence score. We have never encountered cases where a deployment with necessary training data indicates a .9 confidence score on an incorrectly generated SQL.

The demand is huge. Accuracy is less important because the alternative is being completely in the dark or wait for a developer to get the data for you. In my experience people want to quickly get a ballpark number before they dig deeper.

I agree that you should just learn SQL but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of companies want this right now. SQLAI claims to have hundreds of thousands of customers.

Couldn’t agree with this more. Exactly.

I think a lot of people want something like this. Especially as more non technical people are adding business analysts to their jd.

I’ve tried to teach SQL to PMs, bug triage specialists, etc. even a couple of days is too much time for them to learn something not critical or core to their job. Their alternative is to bug data teams with adhoc requests, which data people hate.

A tool like this would probably save 15% of a data teams time, and reduce the worst part of their job. At companies with hundreds, or even thousands, of data folks - that’s massive

And the users are smart people. They can read SQL to see if it looks like the right filters are applied. The “accuracy” issue exists but for certain use cases, it’s honestly not the biggest concern.

Not sure why the tone in this thread is so negative. To the founders, thank you!

we've encountered a lot of instances when people know SQL but just want a first draft of SQL to expedite the process. we see this a lot from data analysts too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com