Forum Discussion
Post PartisanTraining course recommendation on learning Natural Language to SQL within SQL Server?
I’m actually looking into this myself at the moment, so I’m not an expert yet, but I’ve been testing a few approaches in the Microsoft stack.
From what I’ve seen so far, yes, natural language querying over SQL data is possible, but it does not completely remove the need for something like Power BI or a well-structured data model. Your instinct is probably right. The clearer and more descriptive the data is, the better the results tend to be.
If you’re already using SQL Server, Azure, and Power BI, I would stay within that ecosystem and look at things like Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and Copilot, rather than introducing lots of separate tools.
One thing I’ve been experimenting with is using Fabric to bring data into a lakehouse, then using Copilot in Notebooks to explore the data in natural language. This is not a full end-user solution, but more a way to understand how well AI can interpret the dataset.
For example, you can give it a prompt like this:
That will not replace reporting on its own, but it is useful for:
- understanding how AI-ready your data is
- seeing how well natural language works against your schema
- identifying gaps in naming, structure, and relationships
From there, you can move into more user-style questions like:
- “What are the top customers by revenue this quarter?”
- “Show trends over time”
If you are starting from scratch, I would focus training on:
- data modelling
- Power BI and semantic models
- Microsoft Fabric
- Copilot and natural language features on top
So overall, it is achievable, but it works best as an addition to a well-modelled dataset rather than a full replacement for BI.
Would be interested to see what others are using as well.