If You Think You Can Do Real-World Text-to-SQL

Back to Devoured - July 23, 2026

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If You Think You Can Do Real-World Text-to-SQL

Academic text-to-SQL benchmarks fail to capture the chaotic reality of enterprise data warehouses, rendering many high-performing models useless in production.

What: The article critiques current text-to-SQL benchmarks for relying on clean, simplified datasets that do not reflect the complex schemas, inconsistent naming, and undocumented nuances found in actual corporate data warehouses.

Why it matters: It points to a significant gap between model performance in controlled academic environments and the practical, domain-specific knowledge required to write accurate queries against messy real-world databases.

Original article

Text-to-SQL benchmarks overstate performance because real data warehouses are messy and complex.

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