Recent LLM-based approaches have achieved impressive results on Text-to-SQL benchmarks such as Spider and Bird. However, these benchmarks do not accurately reflect the complexity typically encountered in real-world enterprise scenarios, where queries often span multiple tables. In this paper, we introduce HLR-SQL, a new approach designed to handle such complex enterprise SQL queries. Unlike existing methods, HLR-SQL imitates H uman- L ike R easoning with LLMs by incrementally composing queries through a sequence of intermediate steps, gradually building up to the full query. This is an extended version of Eckmann et al. (2025). The new contributions are centered around incorporating human feedback directly into the reasoning process of HLR-SQL. We evaluate HLR-SQL on a newly constructed benchmark, Spider-HJ, which systematically increases query complexity by splitting tables in the original Spider dataset to raise the average join count needed by queries. Our experiments show that state-of-the-art models experience up to a 70% drop in execution accuracy on Spider-HJ, while HLR-SQL achieves a 9.51% improvement over the best existing approaches on the Spider leaderboard. Finally, we extended HLR-SQL to incorporate human feedback directly into the reasoning process by allowing the LLM to selectively ask for human help when faced with ambiguity or execution errors. We demonstrate that including the human in the loop in this way yields significantly higher accuracy, particularly for complex queries.

In this paper, we present ELEET, a novel execution engine that allows one to seamlessly query and process text as a first-class citizen along with tables. To enable such a seamless integration of text and tables, ELEET leverages learned multi-modal operators (MMOps) such as joins and unions that seamlessly combine structured with unstructured textual data. While large language models (LLM) such as GPT-4 are interesting candidates to enable such learned multimodal operations, we deliberately do not follow this trend to enable MMOps, since it would result in high overhead at query runtime. Instead, to enable MMOps, ELEET comes with a more efficient small language model (SLM) that is targeted to extract structured data from text. Thanks to our novel architecture and pre-training procedure, the ELEET-model enables high-accuracy extraction with low overheads. In our evaluation, we compare query execution based on ELEET to baselines leveraging LLMs such as GPT-4 and show that ELEET can speed up multi-modal queries over tables and text by up to 575× without sacrificing accuracy.