SQL
In this guide we'll go over the basic ways to create a Q&A chain and agent over a SQL database. These systems will allow us to ask a question about the data in a SQL database and get back a natural language answer. The main difference between the two is that our agent can query the database in a loop as many time as it needs to answer the question.
⚠️ Security note ⚠️
Building Q&A systems of SQL databases can require executing model-generated SQL queries. There are inherent risks in doing this. Make sure that your database connection permissions are always scoped as narrowly as possible for your chain/agent's needs. This will mitigate though not eliminate the risks of building a model-driven system. For more on general security best practices, see here.
Architecture
At a high-level, the steps of most SQL chain and agent are:
- Convert question to SQL query: Model converts user input to a SQL query.
- Execute SQL query: Execute the SQL query
- Answer the question: Model responds to user input using the query results.
Quickstart
Head to the Quickstart to get started.
Advanced
Once you've familiarized yourself with the basics, you can head to the advanced guides:
- Agents: Building agents that can interact with SQL DBs.
- Prompting strategies: Strategies for improving SQL query generation.
- Query validation: How to validate SQL queries.
- Large databases: How to interact with DBs with many tables and high-cardinality columns.