Chat with your database using AI

Great idea. Looks like a terrific implementation.

Here are things I think and wonder having watched your video and browsed your website...

It makes a very big claim but offers little information. I suppose it's early days but I would need to know things about the interaction with my database.

You give it a connection string only. Is it your claim that it will figure out my database, as if an embedded training set? With no further guidance on my part?

Considering that most of the world uses SQL, your choice to use Mongo in the video demonstration makes me wonder. Is SQL query generation a future thing? That makes me wonder about the status of the project?

You show nice graphs in the demo. Are there limits to what kinds of graphs it can make? Is it some kind of AI generator tech that would allow me to ask it to make anything?

I think this is a really nice looking and potentially wonderful app. I wish you all the luck.

dan_lupashku · 3 years ago

Hi, thank you for your comment, I'll try to address all your points, and I believe that we should add more info on our website. Indeed, it's early and we just launched.

1. Yes, it will figure out your database structure and reply without any further guidance from your part, you don't have to do anything else.

2. We have MySQL and PostgreSQL support (we will add this info on our website, thanks for the feedback).

3. We support a few basic graphs like pie, bar, line and area graphs. You can also get numbers as replies (like totals, averages, etc.), or a table view (you can ask to see a specific entry from your database).

4. You can ask anything, and almost always you will get a good reply.

Feel free to create an account and play around (you don't have to connect your database, we have a demo database that you can use).

I like these projects (recently tried https://databerry.ai and pick any random other two from https://custombot.ai) and where they are going but they don't yet fit what I'm looking for, I've played around the sql agent using langchain etc and it's still a miss most of the time. I don't want charts for basic queries about my users or growth etc as I can write much more detailed queries that can be run anytime and if this is geared towards managers something like https://trevor.io is a tab bit better as it will always give you explicit results.

What I want from an ai tool is strong "inferences" or some "understanding" of the data. Say I have a table with stock data and for this example it just has the following columns, ticker, close, volume_traded, eps_from_last_report, shares_outstanding. Some questions I should be able to ask are

1. What is the market cap of ticker X?

2. What is the 52 week high of ticker Y?

3. Which week had the most growth for ticker Y compared to the least growth for ticker X?

4. What is the pe ratio for ticker Z end of last quarter?

I hope you get my point, if it's a case where I have to fill in some data/formulas to guide it on what I expect that's fine as well but a pass thru to gpt with a subset of the data in the prompt won't hold up outside of toy cases or limited data. If you can solve that use case reliably then you're miles ahead of the pack.

dan_lupashku · 3 years ago

I think that I made the demo too simple. It can handle more complicated use cases and it it's definitely able to answer to most of your questions.

We'd be happy to run those queries for you if you have a sample database and show you that it's possible.

We'll work on a new demo showing more advanced use cases, not just totals and bar charts.

iKlsR · 3 years ago

Thanks for the reply, I will definitely follow up with this. Will prepare a subset of a table and play around with this tonight and if need be contact someone via the chat widget, if it can handle these and a couple more I use as a benchmark won't hesitate to jump on your highest tier.

tqwhite · 3 years ago

vkakade · 3 years ago

Created an account to play with it. Great work! Some suggestions:

1. Accuracy needs to be worked upon. I asked "How many total movies are there" in the demo project, it gave me "You are trying to run an unsafe operation" (!!).

2. It asks for database access if you want to run on your database. Until the trust in the tool is developed and value proposition is clear, will be hard to give any database access.

Thanks for the feedback.

1. Agreed, we're working on this, but for now we just went on the safe side. We don't want people to break things right now and this is why we have tight rules that flag potential dangerous operations.

2. Agreed as well, but you can provide a read-only user, and we store the credentials in an encrypted form. Also, you can whitelist the ips to our ips only.

l5870uoo9y · 3 years ago

If you have some really complex queries that you want to test to see if AI (GPT-4) can generate you are welcome to try: https://aihelperbot.com. After upgrading to GPT-4 I haven't had a single miss so far (when adding database for context).

prophesi · 3 years ago

> Inferences drawn from any of the collected personal information listed above to create a profile or summary about, for example, an individual’s preferences and characteristics [0]

I think it's a brilliant use-case of AI, but I really don't like this especially considering how much personal info is in that list. Kudos for being transparent about it, though.

[0] https://insightbase.ai/privacy

Thank you. We will review our privacy policy because we don't actually collect so much data.

Developing a similar tool with 1-click connection setup and GPT-4 streaming (really improves the generated SQL). I think business analytics tool will have to change their pricing significantly soon due to AI (my pricing starts at $5 per month). I mean, have AI generate SQL and setup a proxy to run the SQL queries directly and display the results in a table. That is a really powerful and accessible tool for a lot of people and it is hard to justify spending upwards to $50 for Tableau and the likes.

[0] https://aihelperbot.com/

Good luck with your project as well!!

adius · 3 years ago

Nice job! We're building something similar for SQLite databases at https://www.airsequel.com. It's not mentioned on the landing page yet, but in our SQL workbench you can already use an AI prompt to generate SQL queries. We think it's important to also show the SQL query and make it editable so that the user can immediately fix simple errors, which is often faster than re-prompting.

We're also working on AI assisted initial database generation (aka dump any data and let the AI figure out how to build up a database from it) and AI assisted Charts / Dashboard generation, which will both be released soon!

Thank you, and good luck with your project as well

mrdrqr · 3 years ago

Since AI's main achilles heal is that it can make up responses, isn't a database widget view the worst use case? Wouldn't you want to be sure the displayed data was exactly correct?

sdenton4 · 3 years ago

Seems like the trick is to use the LLM to produce a query - then the data you get back is simply the result of the query, and you can examine the query to check that it's appropriate.

simonw · 3 years ago

In my own experiments I've caught ChatGPT running the correct query but then hallucinating the results, because the response was too long for the token context window and got truncated!

I have an open issue about that here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette-chatgpt-plugin/issues/2

More about my explorations: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/24/datasette-chatgpt-plug...

netman21 · 3 years ago

This is essentially how we are using ChatGPT to access our database of 3,335 cybersecurity vendors and provide responses.

bt3 · 3 years ago

I found myself wanting something like this the other day trying to query some BigQuery tables I was unfamiliar with.

With that being said, from my vantage, the value of a tool like this is writing the SQL query for me that I can understand, verify, and reuse.

Since it doesn't look you do that, and only return charts or "answers", you're locking users into an analytics solution rather than a tool that provides flexibility to any traditional BI solution.

Perhaps this is explained by a difference in target audience.

Yes, we're locking users into analytics because you can easily ask chatgpt to write an SQL query for you and there's no need for us to replicate the same functionality.

Perhaps I haven't figured out the best way to query ChatGPT, but isn't the magic here that your approach implicitly already understands all the tables/ relationships that exist within database?

bicijay · 3 years ago

I mean, as they are already running the query i think it would be easy to just show it together with the charts and answers.

We were thinking about this. We have the query and we might show it to our users, but we're not going to do that at the moment.

However this could be an option and we might add this feature if it would be valuable to our users.