Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems

Summary: Comprehensive survey/tutorial of NL→SQL in the LLM era covering dataset collection/synthesis, LLM- and agent-driven translation techniques, debugging, and multi-angle, scenario-based evaluation. Provides practitioner guidance for system selection and a research roadmap highlighting open problems in data, robustness, interpretability, evaluation, and deployment. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 14183
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.1945683e-05
Overall Rank: 10,837 | 24.61%
DOI: 10.14778/3750601.3750696

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
10,289	LEAD: Iterative Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning	2026	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 17 of 17 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
369	Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation	2024	VLDB	0.0002547515
998	CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL	2024	SIGMOD	0.00014729379
1,732	CatSQL: Towards Real World Natural Language to SQL Applications	2023	VLDB	0.00010732004
2,321	DBPal: A Fully Pluggable NL2SQL Training Pipeline	2020	SIGMOD	9.03609e-05
2,433	ScienceBenchmark: A Complex Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Natural Language to SQL Systems	2024	VLDB	8.8285962e-05
2,945	Few-shot Text-to-SQL Translation using Structure and Content Prompt Learning	2023	SIGMOD	7.8377395e-05
2,988	NL2SQL is a solved problem... Not!	2024	CIDR	7.7761714e-05
3,501	MT-TeQL: Evaluating and Augmenting Neural NLIDB on Real-world Linguistic and Schema Variations	2022	VLDB	7.0366785e-05
3,635	A Deep Dive into Deep Learning Approaches for Text-to-SQL Systems	2021	SIGMOD	6.8981006e-05
3,662	The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?	2024	VLDB	6.8672143e-05
3,978	OmniSQL: Synthesizing High-quality Text-to-SQL Data at Scale	2025	VLDB	6.5725884e-05
4,825	Synthesizing Natural Language to Visualization (NL2VIS) Benchmarks from NL2SQL Benchmarks	2021	SIGMOD	5.8946721e-05
5,281	State of the Art and Open Challenges in Natural Language Interfaces to Data	2020	SIGMOD	5.5896272e-05
5,455	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.4977219e-05
6,826	Natural Language Interfaces for Databases with Deep Learning	2023	VLDB	4.9142824e-05
9,077	VerifAI: Verified Generative AI	2024	CIDR	4.4010762e-05
9,234	Is Long Context All You Need? Leveraging LLM's Extended Context for NL2SQL	2025	VLDB	4.3690661e-05

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9,151	The Power of Constraints in Natural Language to SQL Translation	2025	VLDB	4.3849295e-05
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