Spent a week testing an AI that writes SQL and it nailed a query my team spent 2 days on
Last Monday our lead data guy asked me to look at this new AI tool that turns plain English into SQL queries. I threw a tricky one at it about joining three tables with a weird date filter, and it spit out the right answer in about 8 seconds. We had two people stuck on that same query for 2 days before that. The weird part was watching it explain why it chose a left join instead of an inner one. Has anyone else tried these text to SQL tools on a real messy database yet?
Did it trip up on the same stuff a human would, like bad column names or NULLs sneaking into that date filter? I used to roll my eyes at these tools and figured they would fall apart on anything messy, but hearing it explain the left join vs inner join thing makes me wonder if I was wrong about that. Curious how much cleanup you had to do after it handed you the query.