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by qsort 353 days ago
I have done something exactly like this in production for a system that turned natural language into SQL. This was pre-LLM, so we had models that produced intent and keywords as structured output and we had to turn it into queries for several backends. The project didn't work out for a variety of reasons, but technically it was beautiful: it produced query plans that in many cases were identical to those from the queries analysts wrote by hand. So yeah, I accidentally wrote a compiler. Does it still count?
1 comments

Two good examples of "builders to SQL" are

https://www.jooq.org/

and

https://www.sqlalchemy.org/

JooQ isn't everybody's taste but I use it for my job and I think it's great particularly in that you can reuse expressions and write generators for complex queries. We have a powerful search interface that combines full-text with other kinds of queries ("Is about topic T", "Data was collected between S and E") that is beautiful. I think it's funny how JooQ has that lispy f(a,b) style (no accident it is like ferocity) and how Sqlalchemy is really fluent and takes advantage of operator overloading.