Runtime-Extensible SQL Parsers Using PEG

This post is a shortened version of our peer-reviewed research paper "Runtime-Extensible Parsers" that was accepted for publication and presentation at the 2025 Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) that is going to be held in Amsterdam between January 19 and 22, 2025. You can read the full paper if you prefer.

The parser is the DBMS component that is responsible for turning a query in string format into an internal representation which is usually tree-shaped. The parser defines which queries are going to be accepted at all. Every single SQL query starts its journey in a parser. Despite its prominent position in the stack, very little research has been published on parsing queries for data management systems. There seems to have been very little movement on the topic in the past decades and their implementations are largely stuck in sixty-year-old abstractions and technologies.

The constant growth of the SQL specification with niche features (e.g., support for graph queries in SQL/PGQ or XML support) as well as the desire to support alternative query notations like dplyr, piped SQL, PRQL or SaneQL makes monolithic parsers less and less practical: in their traditional design, parser construction is a compile-time activity where enormous grammar files are translated into state machine transition lookup tables which are then baked in a system binary. Having those always be present in the parser might be wasteful especially for size-conscious binary distributions like WebAssembly (Wasm).

Many if not most SQL systems use a static parser created using a YACC-style parser toolkit: we are able to easily confirm this for open-source systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL/MariaDB. From analyzing their binaries' symbol names, we also found indications that Oracle, SQL Server and IBM Db2 use YACC. Internally, YACC and its slightly more recent variant GNU Bison as well as the "Lemon" parser generator used by SQLite all use a "single look-ahead left-to-right rightmost derivation" LALR(1) parser generator. This generator translates a formal context-free set of grammar rules in Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) to a parser state machine. LALR parsers are a more space-efficient specialization of LR(k) parsers as first described by Knuth. But in effect, the most advanced SQL systems of 2024 use parser technology from the 1960s. Given that the rest of data management systems have been greatly overhauled since this should raise the question of why the parser did not receive any serious engineering attention.

Database systems are moving towards becoming ecosystems instead of pre-built monoliths. Much of the innovation in the PostgreSQL, SQLite, and DuckDB communities now comes from extensions, which are shared libraries that are loaded into the database system at run-time to extend the database system with features like vector similarity search, geospatial support, file systems, or graph processing. Bundling all those features upfront would be difficult due to additional binary size, external dependencies. In addition, they are often maintained independently by their communities. Thus far, at least in part due to the ubiquity of YACC-style parsers, those community extensions have been restricted from extending syntax. While this is also true in other ecosystems like Python, the design of SQL with its heavy focus on syntax and not function calls makes the extensions second-class citizens that have to somehow work around the restrictions by the original parser, e.g., by embedding custom expressions in strings.

We propose to re-think data management system parser design to create modern, extensible parsers, which allow a dynamic configuration of the accepted syntax at run-time, for example to allow syntax extensions, new statements, or to add entirely new query languages. This would allow to break up the monolithic grammars currently in use and enable more creativity and flexibility in what syntax a data management system can accept, both for industrial and research use. Extensible parsers allow for new grammar features to be easily integrated and tested, and can also help bridge the gap between different SQL dialects by adding support for the dialect of one system to the parser of another. Conversely, it might also be desirable in some use cases to restrict the acceptable grammar, e.g., to restrict the complexity of queries, or to enforce strict compliance with the SQL standard.

Modernizing parser infrastructure also has additional benefits: one of the most-reported support issues with data management systems are unhelpful syntax errors. Some systems go to great lengths to try to provide a meaningful error message, e.g., this column does not exist, did you mean ..., but this is typically limited to resolving identifiers following the actual parsing. YACC-style parsers exhibit "all-or-nothing" behavior, the entire query or set of queries either is accepted entirely or not at all. This is why queries with actual syntactical errors (e.g., SELEXT instead of SELECT are usually harshly rejected by a DBMS. MySQL for example is notorious for its unhelpful error messages:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds
to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'SELEXT'
at line 1.

Parsing Expression Grammar

Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) parsers represent a more modern approach to parsing. PEG parsers are top-down parsers that effectively generate a recursive-descent style parser from a grammar. Through the "packrat" memoization technique PEG parsers exhibit linear time complexity in parsing at the expense of a grammar-dependent amount of extra memory. The biggest difference from a grammar author perspective is the choice operator where multiple syntax options can be matched. In LALR parsers options with similar syntax can create ambiguity and reduce conflicts. In PEG parsers the first matching option is always selected. Because of this, PEG parsers cannot be ambiguous by design.

As their name suggests, parsing expression grammar consists of a set of parsing expressions. Expressions can contain references to other rules, or literal token references, both as actual strings or character classes similar to regular expressions. Expressions can be combined through sequences, quantifiers, optionals, groupings and both positive and negative look-ahead. Each expression can either match or not, but it is required to consume a part of the input if it matches. Expressions are able to look ahead and consider the remaining input but are not required to consume it. Lexical analysis is typically part of the PEG parser itself, which removes the need for a separate step.

One big advantage is that PEG parsers do not require a compilation step where the grammar is converted to for example a finite state automaton based on lookup tables. PEG can be executed directly on the input with minimal grammar transformation, making it feasible to re-create a parser at runtime. PEG parsers are gaining popularity, for example, the Python programming language has recently switched to a PEG parser.

Another big advantage of PEG parsers is error handling: the paper "Syntax Error Recovery in Parsing Expression Grammars" describes a practical technique where parser rules are annotated with "recovery" actions, which can (1) show more than a single error and (2) annotate errors with a more meaningful error message.

A possible disadvantage of memoized packrat parsing is the memory required for memoization: the amount required is proportional to the input size, not the stack size. Of course, memory limitations have relaxed significantly since the invention of LALR parsers sixty years ago and queries typically are not "Big Data"` themselves.

Proof-of-Concept Experiments

To perform experiments on parser extensibility, we have implemented an – admittedly simplistic – experimental prototype PEG parser for enough of SQL to parse all the TPC-H and TPC-DS queries. This grammar is compatible with the cpp-peglib single-header C++17 PEG execution engine.

cpp-peglib uses a slightly different grammar syntax, where / is used to denote choices. The symbol ? shows an optional element, and * defines arbitrary repetition. The special rules Parens() and List() are grammar macros that simplify the grammar for common elements. The special %whitespace rule is used to describe tokenization.

Below is an abridged version of our experimental SQL grammar, with the Expression and Identifier syntax parsing rules omitted for brevity:

Statements <- SingleStmt (';' SingleStmt )* ';'*
SingleStmt <- SelectStmt
SelectStmt <- SimpleSelect (SetopClause SimpleSelect)*
SetopClause <-
    ('UNION' / 'EXCEPT' / 'INTERSECT') 'ALL'?
SimpleSelect <- WithClause? SelectClause FromClause?
    WhereClause? GroupByClause? HavingClause?
    OrderByClause? LimitClause?
WithStatement <- Identifier 'AS' SubqueryReference
WithClause <- 'WITH' List(WithStatement)
SelectClause <- 'SELECT' ('*' / List(AliasExpression))
ColumnsAlias <- Parens(List(Identifier))
TableReference <-
    (SubqueryReference 'AS'? Identifier ColumnsAlias?) /
    (Identifier ('AS'? Identifier)?)
ExplicitJoin <- ('LEFT' / 'FULL')? 'OUTER'?
    'JOIN' TableReference 'ON' Expression
FromClause <- 'FROM' TableReference
    ((',' TableReference) / ExplicitJoin)*
WhereClause <- 'WHERE' Expression
GroupByClause <- 'GROUP' 'BY' List(Expression)
HavingClause <- 'HAVING' Expression
SubqueryReference <- Parens(SelectStmt)
OrderByExpression <- Expression ('DESC' / 'ASC')?
    ('NULLS' 'FIRST' / 'LAST')?
OrderByClause <- 'ORDER' 'BY' List(OrderByExpression)
LimitClause <- 'LIMIT' NumberLiteral
AliasExpression <- Expression ('AS'? Identifier)?
%whitespace <- [ \t\n\r]*
List(D) <- D (',' D)*
Parens(D) <- '(' D ')'

All experiments were run on a 2021 MacBook Pro with the M1 Max CPU and 64 GB of RAM. The experimental grammar and the code for experiments are available on GitHub.

Loading the base grammar from its text representation into the cpp-peglib grammar dictionary with symbolic rule representations takes 3 ms. In case that delay should become an issue, the library also allows to define rules programmatically instead of as strings. It would be straightforward to pre-compile the grammar file into source code for compilation, YACC-style. While somewhat counter-intuitive, it would reduce the time required to initialize the initial, unmodified parser. This difference matters for some applications of e.g., DuckDB where the database instance only lives for a few short milliseconds.

For the actual parsing, YACC parses TPC-H Query 1 in ca. 0.03 ms, where cpp-peglib takes ca. 0.3 ms, a ca. 10 times increase. To further stress parsing performance, we repeated all TPC-H and TPC-DS queries six times to create a 36,840 line SQL script weighing in at ca. 1 MB. Note that a recent study has found that the 99-percentile of read queries in the Amazon Redshift cloud data warehouse are smaller than 16.5 kB.

Postgres takes on average 24 ms to parse this file using YACC. Note that this time includes the execution of grammar actions that create Postgres' parse tree. cpp-peglib takes on average 266 ms to parse the test file. However, our experimental parser does not have grammar actions defined yet. When simulating actions by generating default AST actions for every rule, parsing time increases to 339 ms. Note that the AST generation is more expensive than required, because a node is created for each matching rule, even if there is no semantic meaning in the grammar at hand.

Overall, we can observe a ca. 10 times slowdown in parsing performance when using the cpp-peglib parser. However, it should be noted that the absolute duration of those two processes is still tiny; at least for analytical queries, sub-millisecond parsing time is more than acceptable as parsing still only accounts for a tiny fraction of overall query processing time. Furthermore, there are still ample optimization opportunities in the experimental parsers we created using an off-the-shelf PEG library. For example, the library makes heavy use of recursive function calls, which can be optimized e.g., by using a loop abstraction.

In the following, we present some experiments in extending the prototype parser with support for new statements, entirely new syntax and with improvements in error messages.

It is already possible to replace DuckDB's parser by providing an alternative parser. Several community extensions such as duckpgq, prql and psql use this approach. When trying to parse a query string, DuckDB first attempts to use the default parser. If this fails, it switches to the extension parsers as failover. Therefore, these extensions cannot simply extend the parser with a few extra rules – instead, they implement the complete grammar of their target language.

Adding the UNPIVOT Statement

Let's assume we would want to add a new top-level UNPIVOT statement to turn columns into rows to a SQL dialect. UNPIVOT should work on the same level as e.g., SELECT, for example to unpivot a table t1 on a specific list of columns or all columns (*), we would like to be able to write:

UNPIVOT t1 ON (c1, c2, c3);
UNPIVOT t1 ON (*);

It is clear that we would have to somehow modify the parser to allow this new syntax. However, when using a YACC parser, this would require modifying the grammar, re-running the parser generator, hoping for the absence of shift-reduce conflicts, and then recompiling the actual database system. However, this is not practical at run-time which is when extensions are loaded, ideally within milliseconds.

In order to add UNPIVOT, we have to define a grammar rule and then modify SingleStmt to allow the statement in a global sequence of SQL statements. This is shown below. We define the new UnpivotStatement grammar rule by adding it to the dictionary, and we then modify the SingleStmt rule entry in the dictionary to also allow the new statement.

UnpivotStatement <- 'UNPIVOT' Identifier
    'ON' Parens(List(Identifier) / '*')

SingleStmt <- SelectStatement / UnpivotStatement

Note that we re-use other machinery from the grammar like the Identifier rule as well as the Parens() and List() macros to define the ON clause. The rest of the grammar dictionary remains unchanged. After modification, the parser can be re-initialized in another 3 ms. Parser execution time was unaffected.

Extending SELECT with GRAPH_TABLE

Let's now assume we would want to modify the SELECT syntax to add support for SQL/PGQ graph matching patterns. Below is an example query in SQL/PGQ that finds the university name and year for all students called Bob:

SELECT study.classYear, study.name
FROM GRAPH_TABLE (pg,
    MATCH
        (a:Person WHERE a.firstName = 'Bob')-[s:studyAt]->(u:University)
        COLUMNS (s.classYear, u.name)
) study;

We can see that this new syntax adds the GRAPH_TABLE clause and the pattern matching domain-specific language (DSL) within. To add support for this syntax to a SQL parser at runtime, we need to modify the grammar for the SELECT statement itself. This is fairly straightforward when using a PEG. We replace the rule that describes the FROM clause to also accept a sub-grammar starting at the GRAPH_TABLE keyword following by parentheses. Because the parser does not need to generate a state machine, we are immediately able to accept the new syntax.

Below we show a small set of grammar rules that are sufficient to extend our experimental parser with support for the SQL/PGQ GRAPH_TABLE clause and the containing property graph patterns. With this addition, the parser can parse the query above. Parser construction and parser execution timings were unaffected.

Name <- (Identifier? ':' Identifier) / Identifier
Edge <- ('-' / '<-') '[' Name ']' ('->' / '-')
Pattern <- Parens(Name WhereClause?) Edge
   Parens(Name WhereClause?)
PropertyGraphReference <- 'GRAPH_TABLE'i '('
        Identifier ','
        'MATCH'i List(Pattern)
        'COLUMNS'i Parens(List(ColumnReference))
    ')' Identifier?

TableReference <-
    PropertyGraphReference / ...

dplyr, the "Grammar of Data Manipulation", is the de facto standard data transformation language in the R Environment for Statistical Computing. The language uses function calls and a special chaining operator (%>%) to combine operators. Below is an example dplyr query:

df %>%
  group_by(species) %>%
  summarise(
    n = n(),
    mass = mean(mass, na.rm = TRUE)
  ) %>%
  filter(n > 1, mass > 50)

For those unfamiliar with dplyr, the query is equivalent to this SQL query:

SELECT * FROM (
    SELECT count(*) AS n, AVG(mass) AS mass
        FROM df
        GROUP BY species)
    WHERE n > 1 AND mass > 50;

With an extensible parser, it is feasible to add support for completely new query languages like dplyr to a SQL parser. Below is a simplified grammar snippet that enables our SQL parser to accept the dplyr example from above.

DplyrStatement <- Identifier Pipe Verb (Pipe Verb)*
Verb <- VerbName Parens(List(Argument))
VerbName <- 'group_by' / 'summarise' / 'filter'
Argument <- Expression / (Identifier '=' Expression)
Pipe <- '%>%'

SingleStmt <- SelectStatement /
    UnpivotStatement / DplyrStatement

It is important to note that the rest of the experimental SQL parser still works, i.e., the dplyr syntax now also works. Parser construction and parser execution timings were again unaffected.

Better Error Messages

As mentioned above, PEG parsers are able to generate better error messages elegantly. A common novice SQL user mistake is to mix up the order of keywords in a query, for example, the ORDER BY must come after the GROUP BY. Assume an inexperienced user types the following query:

SELECT customer, SUM(sales)
FROM revenue
ORDER BY customer
GROUP BY customer;

By default, both the YACC and the PEG parsers will report a similar error message about an unexpected 'GROUP' keyword with a byte position. However, with a PEG parser we can define a "recovery" syntax rule that will create a useful error message. We modify the OrderByClause from our experimental grammar like so:

OrderByClause <- 'ORDER'i 'BY'i List(OrderByExpression)
    %recover(WrongGroupBy)?
WrongGroupBy <- GroupByClause
    { error_message "GROUP BY must precede ORDER BY" }

Here, we use the %recover construct to match a misplaced GROUP BY clause, re-using the original definition, and then trigger a custom error message that advises the user on how to fix their query. And indeed, when we parse the wrong SQL example, the parser will output the custom message.

Conclusion and Future Work

In this post, we have proposed to modernize the ancient art of SQL parsing using more modern parser generators like PEG. We have shown how by using PEG, a parser can be extended at run-time at minimal cost without re-compilation. In our experiments we have demonstrated how minor grammar adjustments can fundamentally extend and change the accepted syntax.

An obvious next step is to address the observed performance drawback observed in our prototype. Using more efficient implementation techniques, it should be possible to narrow the gap in parsing performance between YACC-based LALR parsers and a dynamic PEG parser. Another next step is to address some detail questions for implementation: for example, parser extension load order should ideally not influence the final grammar. Furthermore, while parser actions can in principle execute arbitrary code, they may have to be restrictions on return types and input handling.

We plan to switch DuckDB's parser, which started as a fork of the Postgres YACC parser, to a PEG parser in the near future. As an initial step, we have performed an experiment where we found that it is possible to interpret the current Postgres YACC grammar with PEG. This should greatly simplify the transitioning process, since it ensures that the same grammar will be accepted in both parsing frameworks.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Torsten Grust, Gábor Szárnyas and Daniël ten Wolde for their valuable suggestions. We would also like to thank Carlo Piovesan for his translation of the Postgres YACC grammar to PEG.