Enterprises are spending lots of time and money on this. The biggest issue that has slowed down sales cycle at this stage has been data governance. Most folks think it’s about accuracy or latency (which of course is an issue) but data governance can make this whole thing a non starter.
Interesting. So by open sourcing you think companies can self host and it negates some of these issues? Or is your goal into increase future contributions to keep the project alive and developing?
What % of the NL -> SQL problem is solved in the current version? Ie is this something ready for some type of prod work now, or is it “in 2-3 years we’ll be there”?
Not OP, but there was an EHR SaaS company on HN a day or two back with a similar proposition: it’s open source, so it can be independently verified from a security perspective. It was interesting to me because the code was unusable to normal folks, and even other companies - one of the founders described their moat being the trouble of actually integrating with the ecosystem, and weren’t worried about competitors using it. It really hammered home to me how open source is more and more a marketing lever lately.
For companies that are willing to put in some effort, the self hosting option is a great one. There are certain use cases where this works now, and is already in production. These tend to be use cases with some constraints and don’t deal with very sensitive data.
there is a middle ground here. the most complicated queries will need the intel and business context of a smart data scientist. there are however so many types of queries where automation would make the world so much easier and allow more self-serve type data inquiries. too often the rhetoric around these topics is binary as in "it works" or "it doesn't work." in reality, there are certain use cases that work now and others that don't yet.
