Five Quick Checks to Verify AI-Generated SQL Before Trusting the Output

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AI assistants can produce syntactically valid SQL queries in seconds, but a query that runs successfully has only passed a grammar check — not a correctness check. Common errors include fan-out from joins that multiply rows, wrong filters, and incorrect denominators, all of which return clean result sets with wrong numbers. A practical five-step review process, ordered from cheapest to most involved, can catch these mistakes in roughly two minutes using only the existing database. A key example shows an AI-written revenue query returning 1,830 instead of the correct 1,330, because a LEFT JOIN doubled rows for orders with split refunds. Comparing row counts before and after a join is highlighted as a fast, reliable first check to detect such fan-out errors.

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