[AnimalMuppet]

No. Absolutely not. I want to say precisely what I mean and have the database do precisely what I say, no more, no less.

But maybe you're asking the wrong question in your headline. If you could have other people in your organization able to talk to a database in plain English, would you?

This isn't something that most of the HN crowd would want for their own work. There might be a lot of people here who have, say, that upper-level manager who keeps asking for reports for which the HN person has to figure out how to get the data. Handing that manager a tool like this, and letting them run their own queries could get them out of our hair. (It could also be better for the manager, as they run the query, look at the results, and figure out that it wasn't actually the data they were looking for, and so they can iterate the query to get what they're really after.)

One caveat, though: I wouldn't want to hand anyone - even a professional - write access with this kind of a tool.

[brochington]

Ah, yes, Maybe I should clarify who my intended user would be. I agree that if you are technical, you are probably better off using other query methods. I'm always surprised what folks are on here, so was hoping a few would find this question.

> There might be a lot of people here who have, say, that upper-level manager who keeps asking for reports for which the HN person has to figure out how to get the data.

This is 100% the use case I was thinking.

> One caveat, though: I wouldn't want to hand anyone - even a professional - write access with this kind of a tool.

Agree! Not sure how this ever would be safe enough for edits.

[xigoi]

I guess certain kinds of edits could be safe, such as inserting a row and then asking for confirmation.