{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dbcopilot-scaling-natural-language-querying","title":"DBCopilot: Natural Language Querying over Massive Databases via Schema Routing","arxiv_id":"2312.03463","date":"2023-12-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tianshu Wang","Xiaoyang Chen","Hongyu Lin","Xianpei Han","Le Sun","Hao Wang","Zhenyu Zeng"],"abstract":"The development of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs) has been greatly advanced by the advent of large language models (LLMs), which provide an intuitive way to translate natural language (NL) questions into Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. While significant progress has been made in LLM-based NL2SQL, existing approaches face several challenges in real-world scenarios of natural language querying over massive databases. In this paper, we present DBCopilot, a framework that addresses these challenges by employing a compact and flexible copilot model for routing over massive databases. Specifically, DBCopilot decouples schema-agnostic NL2SQL into schema routing and SQL generation. This framework utilizes a single lightweight differentiable search index to construct semantic mappings for massive database schemata, and navigates natural language questions to their target databases and tables in a relation-aware joint retrieval manner. The routed schemata and questions are then fed into LLMs for effective SQL generation. Furthermore, DBCopilot introduces a reverse schema-to-question generation paradigm that can automatically learn and adapt the router over massive databases without manual intervention. Experimental results verify that DBCopilot is a scalable and effective solution for schema-agnostic NL2SQL, providing a significant advance in handling natural language querying over massive databases for NLIDBs.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03463v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.03463v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"dbcopilot-scaling-natural-language-querying","repo_url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"navigate","task_name":"Navigate"},{"task_slug":"question-generation","task_name":"Question Generation"},{"task_slug":"question-generation","task_name":"Question-Generation"},{"task_slug":"text-to-sql","task_name":"Text-To-SQL"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2312.03463","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2312.03463"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran":5},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":5,"ran":5,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":5,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f27926c1d6cdb10a","entry":"deserialize_schema","repo":"tshu-w/dbcopilot","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/utils/helpers.py","file_url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot/blob/HEAD/src/utils/helpers.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f27926c1d6cdb10a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"09eec68ff05f12dd","entry":"get_openai_token_cost_for_model","repo":"tshu-w/dbcopilot","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/utils/openai_with_usage.py","file_url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot/blob/HEAD/src/utils/openai_with_usage.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"09eec68ff05f12dd"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"1d59379d97927c9d","entry":"prefix_allowed_tokens_fn","repo":"tshu-w/dbcopilot","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/models/schema_routing.py","file_url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot/blob/HEAD/src/models/schema_routing.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1d59379d97927c9d"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"c321b050bd1a8d4a","entry":"schema2graph","repo":"tshu-w/dbcopilot","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/utils/helpers.py","file_url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot/blob/HEAD/src/utils/helpers.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"c321b050bd1a8d4a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"e9805154450d22d6","entry":"serialize_schema","repo":"tshu-w/dbcopilot","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/utils/helpers.py","file_url":"https://github.com/tshu-w/dbcopilot/blob/HEAD/src/utils/helpers.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"e9805154450d22d6"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}