Retrieval in the SQL setting has largely been studied as the task of finding, within a large collection of SQL statements, the statement that answers a natural-language question. At scale, however, a more fundamental retrieval problem precedes generation: schema retrieval, identifying the tables and columns a question requires in a database that may contain thousands of them, far more than fit in a model's context.
The paper introduces EXYGEN, a framework that enables conversational access to large knowledge graphs by combining VoID descriptions, ShEx schemas, retrieved triples, and example question‑query pairs in a retrieval‑augmented generation pipeline. On the SciQA benchmark, this approach achieves an exact‑match score of 0.419 without fine‑tuning any large language model, and shows that larger general‑purpose LLMs can outperform smaller code‑specialized ones when provided sufficient context. To scale metadata generation for very large KGs, the authors propose a predicate‑coverage‑aware parallel graph sampling strategy that preserves structural diversity, reduces runtime by over 80× on OpenCitations Meta and GESIS, and is the only tractable method for obtaining complete metadata on ORKG.
By Harshdeep Singh, Yurui Zhu, Giovanni Colavizza, Matteo Romanello
BudgetSchemaBench is a diagnostic tool for evaluating how different schema‑context budgets affect text‑to‑SQL systems. It automatically derives relevance labels from gold SQL, tests four budgets across 80 databases, and compares three schema representations while keeping table rankings fixed. The study shows that increasing the budget improves execution accuracy, especially for lexical retrieval, and that dense retrieval already captures most needed tables at low budgets.
By Chen Shen
The paper examines the role of schema linking in Text-to-SQL systems and finds that recent large language models can effectively use relevant schema elements even when many irrelevant ones are present. Consequently, the authors eliminate schema linking when the entire schema fits within the model’s context window, instead employing augmentation, selection, and correction techniques to enhance accuracy. Their approach achieves first place on the BIRD benchmark with a 71.83% accuracy.
By Karime Maamari, Fadhil Abubaker, Daniel Jaroslawicz, Amine Mhedhbi
arXiv:2602. 16720v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Text-to-SQL systems powered by Large Language Models have excelled on academic benchmarks but struggle in complex enterprise environments.
By Bowen Cao, Weibin Liao, Yushi Sun, Dong Fang, Haitao Li, Wai Lam
Practical AI systems increasingly need to turn long, heterogeneous documents into queryable relational databases, not isolated spreadsheets. In domains such as finance, healthcare, education, transportation, and enterprise operations, downstream workflows rely on normalized schemas, entity identities, keys, cross-table relationships, and integrity constraints for analytics, compliance, auditing, and SQL-backed decision making.
arXiv:2609.14652v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) applications often transfer domain concepts into the model's context informally, through prompt prose, schema dumps, and e...
By Blake G. Fitch
arXiv:2608. 08459v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practical AI systems increasingly need to turn long, heterogeneous documents into queryable relational databases, not isolated spreadsheets.
By Zhuowen Liang, Zhengxuan Zhang, Jiayang Wang, Jiazhuo Chen, Nan Tang
arXiv:2601.13111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes...
By Hassan Soliman, Vivek Gupta, Dan Roth, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2608.29345v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based text-to-SQL systems achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks, they struggle when user querie...
By Yunfan Zhou, Qiming Shi, Yizhou Yang, Di Weng, Yingcai Wu
arXiv:2606. 28387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise text-to-SQL systems often fail before SQL is generated: the model receives the wrong schema context.
By Adarsh Agrawal, Shashank Indukuri
The paper introduces FlockMTL, an extension for database management systems that deeply integrates large language models and retrieval‑augmented generation into DuckDB. It provides model‑driven scalar and aggregate functions, cost‑based optimizations like batching and caching, and new SQL DDL abstractions (PROMPT and MODEL) to treat LLMs as first‑class schema objects. These features aim to simplify the development of knowledge‑intensive analytical applications by reducing the effort required to orchestrate heterogeneous data systems and manage LLM context.
By Anas Dorbani, Sunny Yasser, Jimmy Lin, Amine Mhedhbi