# How to Prompt LLMs for Text-to-SQL: A Study in Zero-shot, Single-domain, and Cross-domain Settings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11853 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11853/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [Learning To Retrieve Prompts for In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08633/) (2021)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05093/) (2021)
- [Binding Language Models in Symbolic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02875/) (2022)
- [Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08205/) (2019)
- [GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13845/) (2020)
- [Synchromesh: Reliable code generation from pre-trained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11227/) (2022)
- [Compositional Generalization and Natural Language Variation: Can a Semantic Parsing Approach Handle Both?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12725/) (2020)
- [Diverse Demonstrations Improve In-context Compositional Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06800/) (2022)
- [Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09029/) (2018)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [LGESQL: Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL Model with Mixed Local and Non-Local Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01093/) (2021)
- [A comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT's zero-shot Text-to-SQL capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13547/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00498/) (2022)
- [SmBoP: Semi-autoregressive Bottom-up Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12412/) (2020)
- [Graphix-T5: Mixing Pre-Trained Transformers with Graph-Aware Layers for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07507/) (2023)
- [Representing Schema Structure with Graph Neural Networks for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06241/) (2019)
- [Natural SQL: Making SQL Easier to Infer from Natural Language Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05153/) (2021)
- [Dr.Spider: A Diagnostic Evaluation Benchmark towards Text-to-SQL Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08881/) (2023)
- [ShadowGNN: Graph Projection Neural Network for Text-to-SQL Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04689/) (2021)
- [XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13693/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15363/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16347/) (2024)
- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models(LLMs) on Tabular Data: Prediction, Generation, and Understanding -- A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17944/) (2024)
- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [Data-Copilot: Bridging Billions of Data and Humans with Autonomous Workflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07209/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Employing Large Language Models for Text-to-SQL Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15186/) (2024)
- [ACT-SQL: In-Context Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automatically-Generated Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17342/) (2023)
- [Unifying the Perspectives of NLP and Software Engineering: A Survey on Language Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07989/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Vector Database: Storage and Retrieval Technique, Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11703/) (2023)
- [Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03256/) (2024)
- [TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10150/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11517/) (2024)
- [PURPLE: Making a Large Language Model a Better SQL Writer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20014/) (2024)
- [Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10671/) (2024)
- [Selective Demonstrations for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06302/) (2023)
- [Reliable Text-to-SQL with Adaptive Abstention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10858/) (2025)
- [TrustSQL: Benchmarking Text-to-SQL Reliability with Penalty-Based Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15879/) (2024)
- [Improving Retrieval-augmented Text-to-SQL with AST-based Ranking and Schema Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03227/) (2024)
- [Aligning Large Language Models to a Domain-specific Graph Database for NL2GQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16567/) (2024)
- [Think2SQL: Reinforce LLM Reasoning Capabilities for Text2SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15077/) (2025)
- [SQL-to-Schema Enhances Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09593/) (2024)
- [Overview of the EHRSQL 2024 Shared Task on Reliable Text-to-SQL Modeling on Electronic Health Records](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06673/) (2024)
- [Improving Demonstration Diversity by Human-Free Fusing for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10663/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Table Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14693/) (2025)
- [Reboost Large Language Model-based Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Python, and Text-to-Function -- with Real Applications in Traffic Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18752/) (2023)
- [Structure Guided Large Language Model for SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13284/) (2024)
- [Knowledge Base Construction for Knowledge-Augmented Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22096/) (2025)
- [Adapt and Decompose: Efficient Generalization of Text-to-SQL via Domain Adapted Least-To-Most Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02582/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning have demonstrated remarkable capability in the text-to-SQL task. Previous research has prompted LLMs with various demonstration-retrieval strategies and intermediate reasoning steps to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, those works often employ varied strategies when constructing the prompt text for text-to-SQL inputs, such as databases and demonstration examples. This leads to a lack of comparability in both the prompt constructions and their primary contributions. Furthermore, selecting an effective prompt construction has emerged as a persistent problem for future research. To address this limitation, we comprehensively investigate the impact of prompt constructions across various settings and provide insights into prompt constructions for future text-to-SQL studies.