are there open source validation parsers for major SQL dialects (TSQL, Oracle, MySQL)? or at least precise specs for these dialects?

Question

word on the street is that Perl is defined not by a spec but by whatever the current interpreter version happens to accept. Now, let's consider an SQL dialect like TSQL. Is there a published spec of it that would allow making a validator equivalent to the one inside SQL Server? Are there such validators already in existence as open source? And the same question for Oracle.

Ok, so for MySQL I am guessing that validator could be extracted directly from the MySQL codebase. Nevertheless, do they in fact publish the spec itself in case I wanted to make my own validator?

Answer 1

You seem to have an idea of what to do for MySQL. I can't really say much about Oracle apart from that it mostly implements ANSI SQL and the PL/SQL procedural language extensions to SQL can mostly be found here for Oracle 9i.

For SQL Server:

Microsoft Books On Line (BOL) is the official reference spec. There are different pages for different versions of SQL Server, however. There are a few projects relating to this. http://www.sqlparser.com/ - This has .NET, Java, COM and VCL versions for Oracle, DB2, Mysql and SQL Server / Sybase (T-SQL). Quite reasonably priced too.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1136/SharpHSQL-An-SQL-engine-written-in-C (c#)

http://antlr.org/ - This looks like a good bet.

I often use this site for formatting of SQL but it also does some validation although it's fairly crude: http://www.dpriver.com/pp/sqlformat.htm

This is a similar site: http://www.tsqltidy.com/

I would suggest that writing a validator for SQL even in just one of its variations is a massive undertaking. You could look at the various ISO/IEC standards for ANSI SQL. ANSI SQL-92 is very widely implemented, but there is a SQL:2008 standard as well. You'd have to pay for the documentation for those standards though and they aren't cheap.

Good luck.