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: 14184
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.1905499e-05
Overall Rank: 10,841 | 24.66%
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
10,301	LEAD: Iterative Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning	2026	VLDB	4.1905499e-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
366	Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation	2024	VLDB	0.00025580097
998	CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL	2024	SIGMOD	0.00014726344
1,731	CatSQL: Towards Real World Natural Language to SQL Applications	2023	VLDB	0.00010723825
2,325	DBPal: A Fully Pluggable NL2SQL Training Pipeline	2020	SIGMOD	9.0277894e-05
2,435	ScienceBenchmark: A Complex Real-World Benchmark for Evaluating Natural Language to SQL Systems	2024	VLDB	8.8218963e-05
2,948	Few-shot Text-to-SQL Translation using Structure and Content Prompt Learning	2023	SIGMOD	7.8301799e-05
2,987	NL2SQL is a solved problem... Not!	2024	CIDR	7.77529e-05
3,506	MT-TeQL: Evaluating and Augmenting Neural NLIDB on Real-world Linguistic and Schema Variations	2022	VLDB	7.0301746e-05
3,636	A Deep Dive into Deep Learning Approaches for Text-to-SQL Systems	2021	SIGMOD	6.8920532e-05
3,666	The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?	2024	VLDB	6.8606092e-05
3,978	OmniSQL: Synthesizing High-quality Text-to-SQL Data at Scale	2025	VLDB	6.5662694e-05
4,829	Synthesizing Natural Language to Visualization (NL2VIS) Benchmarks from NL2SQL Benchmarks	2021	SIGMOD	5.8890126e-05
5,282	State of the Art and Open Challenges in Natural Language Interfaces to Data	2020	SIGMOD	5.5846982e-05
5,462	Natural Language Data Management and Interfaces: Recent Development and Open Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.4924596e-05
6,825	Natural Language Interfaces for Databases with Deep Learning	2023	VLDB	4.9095673e-05
9,073	VerifAI: Verified Generative AI	2024	CIDR	4.396857e-05
9,239	Is Long Context All You Need? Leveraging LLM's Extended Context for NL2SQL	2025	VLDB	4.3648789e-05

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