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Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs

4 May 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2305.03111archive 2025-07-28

Jinyang Li, Binyuan Hui, Ge Qu, Jiaxi Yang, Binhua Li, Bowen Li, Bailin Wang, Bowen Qin, Rongyu Cao, Ruiying Geng, Nan Huo, Xuanhe Zhou, Chenhao Ma, Guoliang Li, Kevin C. C. Chang, Fei Huang, Reynold Cheng, Yongbin Li

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.

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connect_gpt bird-bench/mini_dev/llm/src/gpt_request.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · fc5d13ba31f06eec · report
decouple_question_schema bird-bench/mini_dev/llm/src/gpt_request.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 5076b6aec7f58d64 · report
generate_sql_file bird-bench/mini_dev/llm/src/gpt_request.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 545a130b9f353336 · report
get_connection_for_phase bird-bench/mini_dev/live_sql_bench_sqlite/evaluation/db_utils.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 8f7f721f16a15911 · report
perform_query_on_sqlite_databases bird-bench/mini_dev/live_sql_bench_sqlite/evaluation/db_utils.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 85f2b26606b1f79e · report
sql_response_extract bird-bench/mini_dev/finetuning/inference/vllm_infer.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · a7e85c53a98d5fc1 · report

Tasks

SQL ParsingSemantic ParsingText to SQLText-To-SQL

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) CoT + ChatGPT Execution Accuracy % (Dev) 36.64 #34 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) CoT + ChatGPT Execution Accuracy % (Test) 40.08 #34 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) ChatGPT (Baseline) Execution Accuracy % (Dev) 37.22 #35 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) ChatGPT (Baseline) Execution Accuracy % (Test) 39.30 #35 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) Codex (Baseline) Execution Accuracy % (Dev) 34.35 #36 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) Codex (Baseline) Execution Accuracy % (Test) 36.47 #36 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) Palm-2 (Baseline) Execution Accuracy % (Dev) 27.38 #37 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) Palm-2 (Baseline) Execution Accuracy % (Test) 33.04 #37 of 41 Archive leaderboard report
Text-To-SQL BIRD (BIg Bench for LaRge-scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQL Evaluation) Human Performance Execution Accurarcy (Human) 92.96 #41 of 41 Archive leaderboard report

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