Engineering Self-Healing SQL Pipelines With LLMs: Validation, Guardrails, and Safe Recovery

A self-healing SQL pipeline should not mean autonomous SQL generation followed by privileged execution. In production, the safer interpretation is narrower, where a language model proposes a repair, while deterministic controls decide whether that repair is syntactically valid, semantically plausible, operationally safe, and eligible for execution. This distinction matters because the same mechanism that corrects a renamed column can also generate an unintended DELETE, widen a join, or scan an unexpectedly large dataset.

Structured-output features can constrain an LLM response to a defined schema, but schema conformance is not equivalent to database correctness or authorization. OpenAI’s Structured Outputs is designed to make generated output conform to supplied JSON Schemas, and it does not validate SQL semantics or execution safety.