Understanding SQL parsers

nishchith.com

19 pointsinishchith4 comments

> That turned into about 10 hours of conversation with Claude to pull it all together.

Did the author write an actual parser, or does this mean they spent 10 hours coaxing Claude into writing this blog post?

There's not a lot of depth here, and this doesn't really feel like it says much.

The blog post mostly compares Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server... and then flips between comparisons to BigQuery occasionally, and Snowflake other times. Is that intentional (and is it accurate?), or did the LLM get confused?

Yeah, I am disappointed by how shallow it is. Lexing, Parsing, AST would apply to nearly every programming language and not SQL alone. There’s no mention of how the parsers actually work on the code level, which would have made it an interesting read.

I want to believe people who feel they are 10x more productive with agentic tools but I can’t help notice how there’s lot of doing things that don’t need to be done at all. Either that, or doing them superficially as the article shows.

My friend is organizing a challenge to build a clean room SQL implementation from scratch as fast as possible, using agents:

https://vibesql.org/

https://github.com/vibesql-challenge

https://crates.io/crates/vibesql-parser/0.1.2 is the parser crate

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