[HN Gopher] AskEdith - Natural language interface for databases
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AskEdith - Natural language interface for databases
Author : WallyFunk
Score : 80 points
Date : 2022-11-02 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.askedith.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.askedith.ai)
| garciasn wrote:
| You have an unnecessary apostrophe after "CSV" on your Free tier
| pricing box. Apostrophes do not make initialisms plural.
| glomgril wrote:
| TBH I disagree. In some fields it has become something of a
| convention, especially when the thing you're pluralizing is a
| variable or some other mathematical expression. For example I
| might write $x_1,x_2,...,x_n$, and then refer to the sequence
| as "the $x$'s". Happens all the time in professional journals
| by authors who know very well what the prescriptive rules of
| written English are. It is just easier to read this way.
| aliqot wrote:
| > TBH I disagree.
|
| You may, but it's incorrect. Try to tell o365 about the
| Oxford comma, I tried, it's futile. Best to assimilate and
| maintain pay-stream.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Its defiantly against the do's and donts of English, yes,
| apostrophe's seem to be the most mistaked parts of English.
| Also my favorite cigarette's are Marlboro 100's.
| kierenj wrote:
| Echoing others' experiences, really difficult to try the demo. I
| saw data - I typed a question, hit the button. Nothing. I need to
| hit Enter. Do so. Wait for like a minute - progress bar appears?
| Then a message about datasets. Huh? ..
| Rygian wrote:
| I'm trying out the demo with "What is the most typical experience
| level for people whose job is analyst?" and just get a half-way
| full red progress bar as a reply.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I tried it with "which region has the largest salary
| disparity?" and got the same red bar.
| jrdzha wrote:
| Demo is broken but it works once you login to a free acc
| fny wrote:
| I'm looking forward to the day when there's an open source
| version of these models. I am not interested in making a
| gazillion API calls to a third-party vendor about how I'm
| introspecting into my own reports.
| carbocation wrote:
| Now I can stop tweaking my SQL query and start tweaking my
| prompt.
|
| Less cynically but more critically, you'll still have to review
| the SQL generated by this program. Unlike reviewing art, that
| review will be difficult, because reviewing SQL is not easy
| (unless the query was trivial to begin with).
| petercooper wrote:
| Then you can buy the upgrade that will automatically create
| dummy data and write the tests for the query you just created
| ;-)
| yrgulation wrote:
| I can see this being useful for managers or marketing people but
| not really for engineers.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| Also, it doesn't work.
|
| I uploaded a very simple dataset in a CSV format, and not even
| the suggested questions after the upload works.
| jrdzha wrote:
| Demo is broken but it works once you login to a free acc
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > Demo is broken
|
| This is a deal breaker for me at least; if a service can't
| handle a predicted load from HN and friends, it's not
| trustworthy.
|
| It's like buying a car: if I can't start it before a test-
| drive, I would never buy it.
| jrdzha wrote:
| I hear you, we're fixing it right now.
|
| disclaimer: I worked on AskEdith
| mwigdahl wrote:
| It also prompts to make an account (and won't respond to
| the demo submit request) after what, 3 tries on the demo?
| This not really enough to determine whether it has the
| horsepower to do anything significant. Requiring signup
| to do even basic exploration of capability turns me away.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I don't think you understand.
|
| As long as this is an SaaS, it's useless; no one should
| depend on a third-party provider to create VIEWs for
| them. "Oh, we can't deliver tax reports to the government
| because AskEdith is down" doesn't work as an excuse, at
| least not here in Norway.
| oa335 wrote:
| Wow very cool. Would love to see it interface with Bigquery or
| other data lakes so it could grab the schemas and structure query
| pokstad wrote:
| Where's the anti-ORM crowd to defeat this idea?
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I don't think I'm very anti-ORM, but I prefer using SQL where I
| feel for it. ORM is usually an overhead, and a bad
| implementation can make the ORM useless.
|
| To answer your question: do we need to learn a QRM now? :) I
| think we are a few years away from that, ref. "what was the
| average salary for people earning more than X USD in 2019,
| adjusted for the purchasing power each person lives in?"
|
| This is an example of a third-party data set that you don't
| want to be part of your core application, but maybe for a
| reporting system that talks to both your core application and
| some other third-party sources.
|
| So. I'll stay with SQL until further notice, because a) this
| doesn't work, and b) third party data needs careful handling.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| When you can only produce SQL via natural language prompts then
| how are you going to be able to troubleshoot your queries?
| alberth wrote:
| Silly question, but are you suggesting that in code you'd put:
|
| sql_ai = "which customer spent the most with us in the past 12
| months?";
| yrgulation wrote:
| Shh dont give them ideas. The PHP crowd will absolutely try
| to adopt it.
| pkulak wrote:
| This seems so far in the other direction that the same
| criticisms no longer apply. It would be like being against LCD
| screens in cars, and then complaining that Boeing's new 787 has
| flight displays.
| spapas82 wrote:
| I would really like to see how this would work against non
| trivial data (and queries)
| metadat wrote:
| Are there any DB or cloud vendors already offering natural-
| language to SQL capabilities? I'd be a bit surprised if Google or
| AWS doesn't have it, given their deep expertise in NLP.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| The website's awful. There's no user testing on it - why do I
| have a 20 sec progress bar before it tells me I need to select
| files - where from? Drag from where? What format?
|
| Found the datasets - what is AAPL.csv? What do the columns mean?
| How do I use them to query on? The UI has been designed by
| someone who doesn't know anything about UIs. Like, anything.
|
| Added: "AskEdith translates English to SQL to help you save 1
| hour every day". Well that's a bloody strong claim. Wonder if
| it's justified.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is one of those products where it sounds cool but it will
| only work for very simple queries, where writing the prompt and
| reviewing the generated SQL query takes as much time as writing
| the SQL query from scratch.
|
| Also, even the SQL shown in the EXAMPLES is bad :|
|
| I guess it's true, you won't be writing SQL from scratch, you'll
| be writing SQL from very broken SQL.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Can't see the top sql because it keeps flipping over, WTF.
|
| Where are these examples?
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I copy-pasted them to be able to read them better.
| SELECT first_name, last_name,
| ( SELECT MAX(order_total)
| FROM orders WHERE customer.id =
| orders.customer_id ) AS maximum_order
| FROM customers;
|
| There's this one to get the maximum order amount for each
| customer that struck me, and another similar one.
|
| Instead of doing a JOIN they do this weird subquery. You can
| clearly see that it's the work of an AI and how this AI works
| (putting together lego pieces which are subqueries), because
| nobody would be writing this query like that.
| datalopers wrote:
| Plenty of people write SQL like that. It's usually Python
| devs who are overly fascinated with shitty AI.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I've seen it a lot by older SQL devs or in enterprise
| places with ossified standard patterns. Lots of RDBMS's
| historically had quirks and a lot of workarounds became
| cargo cult practices that often got culturally
| transmitted to the communities of other DBMSs and/or
| survived beyond the problem they were meant to
| workaround.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Am curious. How would you write it 'properly'? Other
| (good) alternative is with toporders as
| ( select max(order_total) as maxOT, customer_id
| from orders group by customer_id )
| select last_name, maxOT from customers join
| toporders on ...
|
| What would you suggest?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| SELECT customer.first_name,
| customer.last_name, max(order.order_total) as
| maximum_order FROM customers customer
| INNER JOIN orders order ON (customer.id =
| order.customer_id) GROUP BY customer.id
| zasdffaa wrote:
| I don't think subqueries are so bad - at least they're
| clear, and if fast, that's surely problem solved. IME
| they are clearer and often faster, so overall better. I
| know purists don't like them but I do.
| [deleted]
| datalopers wrote:
| Correlated subqueries run N times, once for each outer
| row. Your solution (assuming the database supports
| predicate pushdown) is far better.
| srhtftw wrote:
| Well, this isn't that bad on a real database which will
| know to decorrelate[1] the subquery but a GPT based AI
| probably won't advise you to do an EXPLAIN and check the
| plan.
|
| 1- e.g as Jamie explains here https://www.scattered-
| thoughts.net/writing/materialize-decor...
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Now this is a useful answer, and perhaps the best in the
| thread, thanks
| zasdffaa wrote:
| In fairness there's nothing weird about that, it being just
| a typical correlated subquery. I'd quite possibly do it
| that way.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Right, weird wasn't the right word. It's bad (here, not
| always).
| zasdffaa wrote:
| WHY bad? HOW am I supposed to learn anything from "It's
| bad"
| mjirv wrote:
| Awesome! I suspect that natural language will soon be the default
| way we interact with data, so I'm excited to see this. There's
| just such a clear need for something like this and the technology
| is finally ready.
|
| (Full disclosure: I have a side project exploring something
| similar. Demo: https://hermes-odmf.onrender.com. See the Metrics
| Catalog link for available metrics; all data is from 2018)
| michaelmior wrote:
| I'd really like to see studies comparing the accuracy of
| queries with such a system compared to manually written ones to
| know if I can actually trust it. Natural language is a great
| way to interact with data, but only if the intent is correctly
| translated. With AskEdith you at least get a SQL query that can
| potentially be reviewed for correctness.
| mjirv wrote:
| Yes, this is a great point. To a first approximation, whether
| users trust the results is the _only_ thing that matters for
| this kind of tech, imo.
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