What happened with SQL English query?

Question

SQL Server 2000 was deployed with English Query. At that time, I was young and new to SQL so I skipped that chapter. Now after years, there is again an idea of making a logical program which can understand simple user questions.

Is there any alternative to that? Where is English Query now?

Hell

Related question: Why did Microsoft kill “English Query” on SQL Server? – Jutland

Answer 1

Though it's not the same thing, Full Text Search is the closest thing to "English Query" that exists in SQL 2005+.

Duax

Answer 2

English Query was discontinued after SQL Server 2000.

Pola

Too bad, because when you got it set up right it was very cool! I saw a demo of with hooked up with speech recognition and media player --- the presenter said "what is the first song on the last album by the artist who sang start me up. Play it!" Perhaps not great in the so-called real world, but big wow factor on an exibit hall. – Frederiksen

When you consider the wow factor that Apple have been pushing with Siri you have to wonder why English Query got canned. It could have developed in to something really powerful by now. – Aurita

@Chris W: Just an FYI that I posted another question to find out why, and the answer is here: Why did Microsoft kill “English Query” on SQL Server? – Jutland

@Jutland Good to see an official answer though they never asked me if I used it (I did) - and I come across lots of people who wish there was such a feature and didn't know it had ever existed. MS showing their lack of vision once more! – Aurita

+1 @Chris W: Agree, hence why I asked the question, since it's hard to believe it was unpopular; in fact, I'd posted an answer speculating as to why, but a mod deleted it... :-) ...glad it was of use, since I really am puzzled by MS choice, and lack of vision especially given the quote from MS was given less than a month ago... oh, well. Cheers! – Jutland

Although I personally never used this, I certainly can see where it would be extremely helpful. Sounds like a really good 3rd party product idea! – Kangaroo

I used it as well. It was really amazing and ahead of its time. "Show me the cities of companies with users who log in more than once per day" -- and it would figure it all out. ("select city from company where companyid in (select companyid from user where ...") – Joniejonina

Answer 3

English query not part of SQL Server since version 2005

English Query is unfortunately not available in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. You can, however, use a SQL Server 2005 license to install a copy of SQL Server 2000 and use English Query against a SQL Server 2005 database. Speak with your Microsoft representative about the licensing implications for English Query.

Compete

Answer 4

shame. In the late 1990's I integrated Microsoft English Query coupled with speech recognition into an SQL Server database of petroleum well-log data. It allowed the end-user to simply ask things like "what's the average depth of a well in the gulf of mexico?", "show me all wells with sidetracks in Anadarko basin", "show me all the wells over 1000 feet in Texas logged in 1988"

It was quite useful because lots of end-users didn't know how to write these queries on their own, and it took a lot of programming effort to make a tool that was flexibly enough for all the possibly queries they may need.

Ablative

how to add comments to someone else's answer? – Ablative

commenting depend on Reputation level You need 50 points of reputation to be able to comment else's answers. stackoverflow.com/privileges/comment – Hell

it was ahead of its time, but now we need no-SQL English Query instead ;) – Ablative

Answer 5

Where is English Query now?

It was dropped because of lack of use

Is there any alternative to that?

Microsoft suggest looking at the "semantic search" feature, though the two don't seem that similar to me.

Source: MS response to a Customer asking if it could be re-instated.

Posted by Microsoft on 1/13/2012 at 1:37 PM

English Query feature when introduced in SQL Server was not a popular feature and we didn't find lot of customers using it. So it was eventually removed from the product. We have no plans to invest in such technology so I am resolving this as "won't fix". You can look at the Semantic Search feature in SQL Server 2012 to see if that meets your needs.

Brogan

Answer 6

There are several alternatives (commercial and open source projects) today on the market.

One of them is FriendlyData API. It accepts plain English text or voice messages, and converts it into a SQL request. It returns requested data in a simple format like JSON or XML or you can use the generated SQL on your side.

FriendlyData API can connect to any application with a relational database. And you don’t need to index or move your data to an external storage.

You can ask for example something like

• ‘Show me all health technology companies who are located in NYC, LA or in the Bay Area with between 50 and 1000 employees and have raised a funding round in the last six months.’

FriendlyData will instantly convert this text to SQL query and show you the result from your database in suitable format.

Ramires

Answer 7

As previous posts mentioned, Microsoft discontinued English Query.

You can check out Kueri.me

This product provides technology which powers a search-box which converts English to SQL, and it supports SQLServer as backend.

It recognizes various filters, groupings, and other analytics elements, so it can answer questions like

• Show all orders from France in the last 4 months
• Show top 5 orders by total sum in the last week
• What's the average number of orders per customer

and so on. You do have to configure the system to recognize your tables, fields and jargon.

Note : I work at kueri.me

Neanderthal

If you don't mind could you explain the basic theory of the algorithm which kueri.me does in background ? I have started this project as my final year project and I need to submit my project within couple of weeks and i am stucked in this. Um using SharpNLP as nlp library and up to pos-taging, chucking and other basics i have done. I have read some research papers where some nlibd (Precies, Ladder) created using maxflow algorithm. but i am not familiar whit those if you can help me out it would be great and i appreciate it. Thanks a lot @Yossi. hope to hear from you – Droshky

Sure,Kueri at its core relies on the user configuring keywords - topic names for tables, aliases for columns. After that Kueri is able to wrok by recognizing these keywords and many pre-configured ones. you can write me at yossiv at simpleql.com for more info – Neanderthal

wow this is so cool. Okay il get back to you after checking the web thanks @Yossiv – Droshky

Answer 8

It's back! ;-)

Microsoft has announced a private preview of Copilot for SQL Azure, which offers a natural language for SQL conversion and self-help for database administration.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2024/03/sql-azure-copilot-preview/

Bounds