A Cost-Aware Agentic Architecture for NL-to-SQL over Nested Enterprise Schemas, with a New Benchmark

arXiv:2609.04641 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-04 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-04

Updated: 2026-09-04

Comments: 17 pages, 3 figures

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Natural-language-to-SQL systems have ad- vanced rapidly on academic benchmarks, yet production enterprise schemas exhibit graph- like, semi-structured, deeply nested structure that current benchmarks

Terminology

Abstract

Natural-language-to-SQL systems have ad- vanced rapidly on academic benchmarks, yet production enterprise schemas exhibit graph- like, semi-structured, deeply nested structure that current benchmarks do not measure. We make two complementary contributions. First, we introduce the DevRev NL2SQL bench- mark: 900 execution-verified queries with nested-type and link-graph structure, accom- panied by the Semantic Depth Score (SDS), a schema-agnostic rubric for analytical reasoning depth. Second, we present a cost-aware single- generation agentic architecture whose schema- selection, metadata-retrieval, and error-repair components are designed for the requirements this regime imposes. On the DevRev NL2SQL benchmark the system attains 91.7% answer correctness, a margin of 54.6 percentage points over the next-best baseline; on the Spider 2.0 Snowflake public dataset, it is competitive with leading systems at a single-generation operating point.

Related papers