SWE-SQL: Illuminating LLM Pathways to Solve User SQL Issues in Real-World Applications

Jinyang Li; Xiaolong Li; Ge Qu; Per Jacobsson; Bowen Qin; Binyuan Hui; Shuzheng Si; Nan Huo; Xiaohan Xu; Yue Zhang; Ziwei Tang; Yuanshuai Li; Florensia Widjaja; Xintong Zhu; Feige Zhou; Yongfeng Huang; Yannis Papakonstantinou; Fatma Ozcan; Chenhao Ma; Reynold Cheng

arXiv · 2506.18951

SWE-SQL: Illuminating LLM Pathways to Solve User SQL Issues in Real-World Applications

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Abstract

Resolution of complex SQL issues persists as a significant bottleneck in real-world database applications. Current Large Language Models (LLMs), while adept at text-to-SQL translation, have not been rigorously evaluated on the more challenging task of debugging SQL issues. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-CRITIC, a new SQL issue debugging benchmark comprising 530 PostgreSQL tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-PG) and 570 multi-dialect tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-Multi), distilled from authentic user issues and replayed within new environments to facilitate rigorous evaluation. Baseline evaluations underscore the task's complexity, with the leading reasoning model O3-Mini achieving only 38.87% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 33.33% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi. Meanwhile, advancing open-source models for database tasks is crucial for empowering local development while safeguarding data privacy. Therefore, we present Six-Gym (Sql-fIX-Gym), a training environment for elevating open-source model capabilities for SQL issue debugging. This environment leverages SQL-Rewind strategy, which automatically generates executable issue-solution datasets by reverse-engineering issues from verified SQLs. However, popular trajectory-based fine-tuning methods do not explore substantial supervisory signals. We further propose f-Plan Boosting, which extracts high-level debugging plans from SQL solutions, enabling teacher LLMs to produce 73.7% more successful trajectories for training. We integrate these components into an open-source agent, Bird-Fixer. Based on Qwen-2.5-Coder-14B, Bird-Fixer achieves 38.11% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 29.65% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi, surpassing leading proprietary models such as Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4.1, marking a significant step toward democratizing sophisticated SQL-debugging capabilities. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-critic.github.io/

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Jinyang Li, Xiaolong Li, Ge Qu, Per Jacobsson, Bowen Qin, Binyuan Hui, Shuzheng Si, Nan Huo, Xiaohan Xu, Yue Zhang, Ziwei Tang, Yuanshuai Li, Florensia Widjaja, Xintong Zhu, Feige Zhou, Yongfeng Huang, Yannis Papakonstantinou, Fatma Ozcan, Chenhao Ma, Reynold Cheng. 2026-01-24. SWE-SQL: Illuminating LLM Pathways to Solve User SQL Issues in Real-World Applications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18951

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