# BASE-SQL: A powerful open source Text-To-SQL baseline approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15363/) (2023)
- [Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08205/) (2019)
- [RESDSQL: Decoupling Schema Linking and Skeleton Parsing for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05965/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16347/) (2024)
- [CHESS: Contextual Harnessing for Efficient SQL Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16755/) (2024)
- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [CHASE-SQL: Multi-Path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01943/) (2024)
- [MCS-SQL: Leveraging Multiple Prompts and Multiple-Choice Selection For Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07467/) (2024)
- [TypeSQL: Knowledge-based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09769/) (2018)
- [SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-DomainText-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05237/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Employing Large Language Models for Text-to-SQL Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15186/) (2024)
- [The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07702/) (2024)
- [Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03256/) (2024)
- [RSL-SQL: Robust Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00073/) (2024)
- [Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15307/) (2024)
- [E-SQL: Direct Schema Linking via Question Enrichment in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16751/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Ranking Network for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04759/) (2020)
- [Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10671/) (2024)
- [MSc-SQL: Multi-Sample Critiquing Small Language Models For Text-To-SQL Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12916/) (2024)
- [PTD-SQL: Partitioning and Targeted Drilling with LLMs in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14082/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [CSC-SQL: Corrective Self-Consistency in Text-to-SQL via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13271/) (2025)
- [SLM-SQL: An Exploration of Small Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22478/) (2025)
- [SING-SQL: A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for In-Domain Text-to-SQL Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25672/) (2025)
- [JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14305/) (2025)
- [SQLConductor: Search-to-Policy Learning for Step-wise Text-to-SQL Orchestration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23537/) (2026)
- [UNJOIN: Enhancing Multi-Table Text-to-SQL Generation via Schema Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18122/) (2025)
- [ACE-SQL: Adaptive Co-Optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05906/) (2026)
- [Beyond Static Rules: Automated Discovery of Latent Vulnerabilities in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03833/) (2026)
- [SAFAARI: Schema-Aware Framework for Accelerated Advertiser Response Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25042/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The conversion of natural language into SQL language for querying databases (Text-to-SQL) has broad application prospects and has attracted widespread attention. At present, the mainstream Text-to-SQL methods are mainly divided into in-context learning (ICL) based methods and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) based methods. ICL-based methods can achieve relatively good results thanks to the use of the most advanced closed-source models. However, in real-world application scenarios, factors such as data privacy, SQL generation efficiency and cost need to be considered. SFT-based methods have certain advantages. At present, methods based on fine-tuning of open source models lack easy-to-implement and effective (cost-effective) baseline methods. We propose a pipeline-based method using open source model fine-tuning, referred to as BASE-SQL, which includes four components: Schema Linking, Candidate SQL Generate, SQL Revision and SQL Merge Revision. Experimental results show that BASE-SQL uses the open source model Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct, and achieves an accuracy of 67.47% on the BIRD development set and 88.9% on the Spider test set, which is significantly better than other methods using open source models, and even exceeds several methods using the GPT-4o closed-source model. At the same time, BASE-SQL is easy to implement and highly efficient (on average, only five calls to the large language model are required to generate SQL once). The code will be open sourced at https://github.com/CycloneBoy/base_sql.