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in reply to Re^3: In search of an efficient query abstractor
in thread In search of an efficient query abstractor

Understood. I'm an ex-CS student whose theory is now a distant memory :) But I don't think I need to actually parse SQL to accomplish this. Abstracting away strings and numbers is a much easier problem than parsing a language, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be faster (perhaps not in Perl, though).

Alas, the MySQL grammar is not actually the same thing as the gray box on the manual pages. The real grammar is in sql_yacc.yy which is something from a horror film.

  • Comment on Re^4: In search of an efficient query abstractor

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Re^5: In search of an efficient query abstractor
by mpeg4codec (Pilgrim) on Dec 07, 2008 at 22:05 UTC

    yacc requires the grammar to be LALR, which I agree belongs in the ninth circle of hell. The grammar on the MySQL pages is an unspecified sort of context free grammar and I believe RecDescent supports that.

    This is pretty similar to the HTML parsing debate (which never seems to end). You want to get some data out of an HTML page? Go with regex. Want to do anything related to the structure of the HTML and actually parse it? Definitely go with one of the parser modules.

    Analogously, since you're trying to poke around the structure of SQL statements, my recommendation still stands. OTOH, I can understand resistance with regard to picking up RecDescent for a relatively straightforward task such as this one.

    Best of luck!

[reply]
      I would recommend strongly against Parse::RecDescent for this. That was written before the /g modifier existed in Perl and so every time it matches a token it makes a copy of everything that comes after the token. On even a fairly small data set this can take a prohibitive amount of time and memory.

      Changing that would entail rewriting the whole module. TheDamian had plans to do this, but I don't know if it ever happened. He did tell me that said rewrite was going to have to be incompatible with the original in some ways.

[reply]
        Why isn't this important fact in the perldoc?
[reply]

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