Parsing SQL with Python

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I want to create a SQL interface on top of a non-relational data store. Non-relational data store, but it makes sense to access the data in a relational manner.

I am looking into using ANTLR to produce an AST that represents the SQL as a relational algebra expression. Then return data by evaluating/walking the tree.

I have never implemented a parser before, and I would therefore like some advice on how to best implement a SQL parser and evaluator.

  • Does the approach described above sound about right?
  • Are there other tools/libraries I should look into? Like PLY or Pyparsing.
  • Pointers to articles, books or source code that will help me is appreciated.

Update:

I implemented a simple SQL parser using pyparsing. Combined with Python code that implement the relational operations against my data store, this was fairly simple.

As I said in one of the comments, the point of the exercise was to make the data available to reporting engines. To do this, I probably will need to implement an ODBC driver. This is probably a lot of work.

5 Answers

Of course, it may be best to leverage python-sqlparse on Google Code

UPDATE: Now I see that this has been suggested - I concur that this is worthwhile:

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