Extensible SQL Lexer and Parser for Rust

The goal of this project is to build a SQL lexer and parser capable of parsing SQL that conforms with the ANSI SQL:2011 standard but also making it easy to support custom dialects so that this crate can be used as a foundation for vendor-specific parsers.

This parser is currently being used by the DataFusion query engine and LocustDB.

Example

The current code is capable of parsing some trivial SELECT and CREATE TABLE statements.

let sql = "SELECT a, b, 123, myfunc(b) \
           FROM table_1 \
           WHERE a > b AND b < 100 \
           ORDER BY a DESC, b";

let dialect = GenericSqlDialect{}; // or AnsiSqlDialect, or your own dialect ...

let ast = Parser::parse_sql(&dialect,sql.to_string()).unwrap();

println!("AST: {:?}", ast);

This outputs

AST: SQLSelect { projection: [SQLIdentifier("a"), SQLIdentifier("b"), SQLLiteralLong(123), SQLFunction { id: "myfunc", args: [SQLIdentifier("b")] }], relation: Some(SQLIdentifier("table_1")), selection: Some(SQLBinaryExpr { left: SQLBinaryExpr { left: SQLIdentifier("a"), op: Gt, right: SQLIdentifier("b") }, op: And, right: SQLBinaryExpr { left: SQLIdentifier("b"), op: Lt, right: SQLLiteralLong(100) } }), order_by: Some([SQLOrderBy { expr: SQLIdentifier("a"), asc: false }, SQLOrderBy { expr: SQLIdentifier("b"), asc: true }]), group_by: None, having: None, limit: None }

Design

This parser is implemented using the Pratt Parser design, which is a top-down operator-precedence parser.

I am a fan of this design pattern over parser generators for the following reasons:

• Code is simple to write and can be concise and elegant (this is far from true for this current implementation unfortunately, but I hope to fix that using some macros)
• Performance is generally better than code generated by parser generators
• Debugging is much easier with hand-written code
• It is far easier to extend and make dialect-specific extensions compared to using a parser generator

Supporting custom SQL dialects

This is a work in progress but I started some notes on writing a custom SQL parser.

Contributing

Contributors are welcome! Please see the current issues and feel free to file more!