The autonomous car analogy is a good one. The technology is overall so far superior to a human (probably scrolling TikTok) driving but the moment it makes a mistake we remove the AEV which would be to to higher societal benefit.
Decisions should be made against an alternative, not against some fictitious perfect solution.
For companies that are willing to put in some effort, the self hosting option is a great one. There are certain use cases where this works now, and is already in production. These tend to be use cases with some constraints and don’t deal with very sensitive data.
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.
Enterprises are spending lots of time and money on this. The biggest issue that has slowed down sales cycle at this stage has been data governance. Most folks think it’s about accuracy or latency (which of course is an issue) but data governance can make this whole thing a non starter.
there is a middle ground here. the most complicated queries will need the intel and business context of a smart data scientist. there are however so many types of queries where automation would make the world so much easier and allow more self-serve type data inquiries. too often the rhetoric around these topics is binary as in "it works" or "it doesn't work." in reality, there are certain use cases that work now and others that don't yet.
therein lies the nuance. some people expect to get a natural language answer back. others expect to get a data table back. others expect to get correct SQL back. this is why it's so important to understand the use case and not bucket everything together.
I agree with you. The larger point with text to SQL, however, is that it will not work if it is a simple wrap of an LLM (GPT or otherwise). Text to SQL will only work if there is a sufficient understanding of the business context required. To do this is hard, but with tools such as Dataherald a dev's life gets a whole lot easier.