What happened with SQL English query?

Question

SQL Server 2000 was deployed with English Query. At that time, I was young and new to SQL so I skipped that chapter. Now after years, there is again an idea of making a logical program which can understand simple user questions.

Is there any alternative to that? Where is English Query now?

Answer 1

shame. In the late 1990's I integrated Microsoft English Query coupled with speech recognition into an SQL Server database of petroleum well-log data. It allowed the end-user to simply ask things like "what's the average depth of a well in the gulf of mexico?", "show me all wells with sidetracks in Anadarko basin", "show me all the wells over 1000 feet in Texas logged in 1988"

It was quite useful because lots of end-users didn't know how to write these queries on their own, and it took a lot of programming effort to make a tool that was flexibly enough for all the possibly queries they may need.

Answer 2

English query not part of SQL Server since version 2005

English Query is unfortunately not available in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. You can, however, use a SQL Server 2005 license to install a copy of SQL Server 2000 and use English Query against a SQL Server 2005 database. Speak with your Microsoft representative about the licensing implications for English Query.

Answer 3

Though it's not the same thing, Full Text Search is the closest thing to "English Query" that exists in SQL 2005+.

Answer 4

Where is English Query now?

It was dropped because of lack of use

Is there any alternative to that?

Microsoft suggest looking at the "semantic search" feature, though the two don't seem that similar to me.

Source: MS response to a Customer asking if it could be re-instated.

Posted by Microsoft on 1/13/2012 at 1:37 PM

English Query feature when introduced in SQL Server was not a popular feature and we didn't find lot of customers using it. So it was eventually removed from the product. We have no plans to invest in such technology so I am resolving this as "won't fix". You can look at the Semantic Search feature in SQL Server 2012 to see if that meets your needs.

Answer 5

English Query was discontinued after SQL Server 2000.

Answer 6

There are several alternatives (commercial and open source projects) today on the market.

One of them is FriendlyData API. It accepts plain English text or voice messages, and converts it into a SQL request. It returns requested data in a simple format like JSON or XML or you can use the generated SQL on your side.

FriendlyData API can connect to any application with a relational database. And you don’t need to index or move your data to an external storage.

You can ask for example something like

• ‘Show me all health technology companies who are located in NYC, LA or in the Bay Area with between 50 and 1000 employees and have raised a funding round in the last six months.’

FriendlyData will instantly convert this text to SQL query and show you the result from your database in suitable format.