Cortex AISQL: A Production SQL Engine for Unstructured Data

arXiv:2511.07663v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Snowflake's Cortex AISQL is a production SQL engine that integrates native semantic operations directly into SQL. This integration allows users to write declarative queries that combine relational operations with semantic reasoning, enabling them to query both structured and unstructured data effortlessly. However, making semantic operations efficient at production scale poses fundamental challenges. Semantic operations are more expensive