Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems
Summary: A comprehensive tutorial on LLM- and agent-based NL2SQL, spanning training-data collection/synthesis, translation, debugging, and scenario-aware evaluation. It distills practitioner guidance and articulates open research challenges for reliable database access. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Yuyu Luo (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
- 2. Guoliang Li (Tsinghua University)
- 3. Ju Fan (Renmin University of China)
- 4. Chengliang Chai (Beijing Institute of Technology)
- 5. Nan Tang (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
BibTeX Citation
@article{luo_vldb25,
title = {{Natural Language to SQL: State of the Art and Open Problems}},
author = {Luo, Yuyu and Li, Guoliang and Fan, Ju and Chai, Chengliang and Tang, Nan},
journal = {PVLDB},
series = {{VLDB} '25},
volume = {18},
number = {12},
pages = {5466--5471},
doi = {10.14778/3750601.3750696},
url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3750601.3750696},
year = {2025}
}Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7,115 | LEAD: Iterative Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning | 2026 | VLDB | 5.580601e-05 |
| 10,510 | DBugScribe: Automatic Database Bug Reproduction from Community Reports | 2026 | SIGMOD | 4.9605343e-05 |
| 10,511 | DeepEye-SQL: A Software-Engineering-Inspired Text-to-SQL Framework | 2026 | SIGMOD | 4.9605343e-05 |
| 10,574 | Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards | 2026 | SIGMOD | 4.9605343e-05 |
| 10,962 | Dial: A Knowledge-Grounded Dialect-Specific NL2SQL System | 2026 | VLDB | 4.9605343e-05 |
| 11,094 | Bridging LLMs and Database Systems: A Deep Dive into Enhanced Relational Operators | 2026 | VLDB | 4.9605343e-05 |
Previous
Page 1 / 1
Next
Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 18 of 18 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
Previous
Page 1 / 1
Next
Semantically Similar Papers
| # | Overall Rank | Paper | Year | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7,972 | The Power of Constraints in Natural Language to SQL Translation | 2025 | VLDB |
| 2 | 12,101 | Toward Pure Natural Language Interaction with Databases | 2020 | CIDR |
| 3 | 10,766 | NL2SQLBench: A Modular Benchmarking Framework for LLM-Enabled NL2SQL Solutions | 2026 | VLDB |
| 4 | 5,143 | State of the Art and Open Challenges in Natural Language Interfaces to Data | 2020 | SIGMOD |
| 5 | 3,358 | Combining Small Language Models and Large Language Models for Zero-Shot NL2SQL | 2024 | VLDB |
| 6 | 3,246 | A Deep Dive into Deep Learning Approaches for Text-to-SQL Systems | 2021 | SIGMOD |
| 7 | 6,328 | Natural Language Interfaces for Databases with Deep Learning | 2023 | VLDB |
| 8 | 2,117 | The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready? | 2024 | VLDB |
| 9 | 755 | Natural language to SQL: Where are we today? | 2020 | VLDB |
| 10 | 2,118 | NL2SQL is a solved problem... Not! | 2024 | CIDR |