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blendsql
SQL 🤝 LLMs

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pip install blendsql

BlendSQL is a superset of SQLite for problem decomposition and hybrid question-answering with LLMs.

As a result, we can Blend together...

  • 🥤 ...operations over heterogeneous data sources (e.g. tables, text, images)
  • 🥤 ...the structured & interpretable reasoning of SQL with the generalizable reasoning of LLMs

It can be viewed as an inversion of the typical text-to-SQL paradigm, where a user calls a LLM, and the LLM calls a SQL program.

Now, the user is given the control to oversee all calls (LLM + SQL) within a unified query language.

comparison

For example, imagine we have the following table titled parks, containing info on national parks in the United States.

We can use BlendSQL to build a travel planning LLM chatbot to help us navigate the options below.

Name Image Location Area Recreation Visitors (2022) Description
Death Valley death_valley.jpeg California, Nevada 3,408,395.63 acres (13,793.3 km2) 1,128,862 Death Valley is the hottest, lowest, and driest place in the United States, with daytime temperatures that have exceeded 130 °F (54 °C).
Everglades everglades.jpeg Alaska 7,523,897.45 acres (30,448.1 km2) 9,457 The country's northernmost park protects an expanse of pure wilderness in Alaska's Brooks Range and has no park facilities.
New River Gorge new_river_gorge.jpeg West Virgina 7,021 acres (28.4 km2) 1,593,523 The New River Gorge is the deepest river gorge east of the Mississippi River.
Katmai katmai.jpg Alaska 3,674,529.33 acres (14,870.3 km2) 33,908 This park on the Alaska Peninsula protects the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, an ash flow formed by the 1912 eruption of Novarupta.

BlendSQL allows us to ask the following questions by injecting "ingredients", which are callable functions denoted by double curly brackets ({{, }}).

Which parks don't have park facilities? 

SELECT "Name", "Description" FROM parks
  WHERE {{
      LLMMap(
          'Does this location have park facilities?',
          context='parks::Description'
      )
  }} = FALSE

Name Description
Everglades The country's northernmost park protects an expanse of pure wilderness in Alaska's Brooks Range and has no park facilities.

What does the largest park in Alaska look like?

SELECT "Name",
{{ImageCaption('parks::Image')}} as "Image Description",
{{
    LLMMap(
        question='Size in km2?',
        context='parks::Area'
    )
}} as "Size in km" FROM parks
WHERE "Location" = 'Alaska'
ORDER BY "Size in km" DESC LIMIT 1
Name Image Description Size in km
Everglades A forest of tall trees with a sunset in the background. 30448.1

Which state is the park in that protects an ash flow?

SELECT "Location", "Name" AS "Park Protecting Ash Flow" FROM parks
    WHERE "Name" = {{
      LLMQA(
        'Which park protects an ash flow?',
        context=(SELECT "Name", "Description" FROM parks),
        options="parks::Name"
      )
  }}
Location Park Protecting Ash Flow
Alaska Katmai

How many parks are located in more than 1 state?

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM parks
    WHERE {{LLMMap('How many states?', 'parks::Location')}} > 1
Count
1

Now, we have an intermediate representation for our LLM to use that is explainable, debuggable, and very effective at hybrid question-answering tasks.

For in-depth descriptions of the above queries, check out our documentation.

Features

  • Supports many DBMS 💾
  • SQLite, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, Pandas (aka duckdb in a trenchcoat)
  • Supports many models ✨
  • Transformers, OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama
  • Easily extendable to multi-modal usecases 🖼️
  • Smart parsing optimizes what is passed to external functions 🧠
  • Traverses abstract syntax tree with sqlglot to minimize LLM function calls 🌳
  • Constrained decoding with guidance 🚀
  • LLM function caching, built on diskcache 🔑

Citation

@article{glenn2024blendsql,
      title={BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra},
      author={Parker Glenn and Parag Pravin Dakle and Liang Wang and Preethi Raghavan},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2402.17882},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to those below for inspiring this project. Definitely recommend checking out the linked work below, and citing when applicable!