feyn releases text-to-SQL model SQRL

feyn, known for the RAG chunking library Chonkie, has released a text-to-SQL model series called SQRL on Hugging Face. It comes in three sizes—SQRL-4B, SQRL-9B, and SQRL-35B-A3B—all under the Apache 2.0 license.

The key differentiator is its "Digs Before It Queries" approach. While existing text-to-SQL models generate SQL directly by looking only at the schema, SQRL first runs read-only exploratory queries against the DB when there is ambiguity, checking actual value formats, join paths, and filter conditions before finalizing the query. Up to 5 rounds of exploration are allowed.

Performance: The flagship SQRL-35B-A3B achieved 70.6% execution accuracy on the BIRD Dev benchmark, surpassing Claude Opus 4.6 (68.77%). The smaller SQRL-4B, which is a self-hostable size, also maintains accuracy close to frontier-model level.

By design, easy questions such as simple counting are answered immediately without exploration, and the exploration cost is only incurred when value formats are unclear—aiming to combine the efficiency of single-shot models with the accuracy of multi-step pipelines.