The Real Bottleneck of Text2SQL is Evaluation

Away-Pollution3362 · reddit · 2026-07-13

The author points out that the real difficulty with Text2SQL isn't whether the model can write SQL, but **how to determine if the output is correct**. They pose a set of key questions for NL2SQL / Text2SQL in production environments: - Do you maintain a gold-standard dataset? What is its scale and update frequency? - Should evaluation rely on **exact SQL matching**, **result set equivalence**, or **manual review**? - How do you handle low-confidence or ambiguous queries? - How do you catch cases where the "query runs, but the numbers are actually wrong"? - If using Databricks Genie, should evaluation happen at the SQL, result, or business intent level? The core takeaway: at a real enterprise scale, the model itself is rarely the hardest part; **evaluation and reliability** are the true bottlenecks.

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