SQaLe: A large text-to-SQL corpus grounded in real schemas

Cornelius Wolff, Daniel Gomm, Madelon Hulsebos

Submission Type: Short paper (4 pages)

Keywords: Text-to-SQL, Dataset, Scale, Schemas

TL;DR: SQALE is a semi-synthetic text-to-SQL dataset of 506,083 validated (question, schema, query) pairs built from 22,989 real-world database schemas using a LLM-based generation pipeline.

Abstract: Advances in large language models have accelerated progress in text-to-SQL, methods for converting natural language queries into valid SQL queries. A key bottleneck for developing generalizable text-to-SQL models is the lack of large-scale datasets with sufficient schema and query complexity, domain coverage, and task diversity. We introduce SQaLe, a large-scale semi-synthetic text-to-SQL dataset built on 135,875 relational database schemas expanded from a collection of real-world schemas, SchemaPile. We establish a principled generation pipeline which combines schema sampling, question synthesis, and SQL construction, and produce 517,676 high-quality (question, schema, query) triples. The SQaLe dataset captures realistic schema size variability, diverse query patterns, and natural language ambiguity while maintaining execution validity. We provide an analysis of its contents and characteristics, and find that SQaLe introduces the most realistic large-scale text-to-SQL dataset to date in comparison with existing benchmarks and datasets. We discuss how SQaLe enables our vision for data scaling and model generalization in text-to-SQL research. The dataset is accessible at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/trl-lab/SQaLe-text-to-SQL-dataset.

Submission Number: 53