How to use regular expressions properly on a SQL files? - regex

Question

I have a lot of undocumented and uncommented SQL queries. I would like to extract some information within the SQL-statements. Particularly, I'm interested in DB-names, table names and if possible column names. The queries have usually the following syntax.
SELECT *
FROM mydb.table1 m
LEFT JOIN mydb.sometable o ON m.id = o.id
LEFT JOIN mydb.sometable t ON p.id=t.id
LEFT JOIN otherdb.sometable s ON s.column='test'
Usually, the statements involes several DBs and Tables. I would like only extract DBs and Tables with any other information. I thought if whether it is possible to extract first the information which begins after FROM & JOIN & LEFT JOIN. Here its usually db.table letters such as o t s correspond already to referenced tables. I suppose they are difficult to capture. What I tried without any success is to use something like:
gsub(".*FROM \\s*|WHERE|ORDER|GROUP.*", "", vec)
Assuming that each statement ends with WHERE/where or ORDER/order or GROUP... But that doesnt work out as expected.

Answer 1

You haven't indicated which database system you are using but virtually all such systems have introspection facilities that would allow you to get this information a lot more easily and reliably than attempting to parse SQL statements. The following code which supposes SQLite can likely be adapted to your situation by getting a list of your databases and then looping over the databases and using dbConnect to connect to each one in turn running code such as this:
library(gsubfn)
library(RSQLite)
con <- dbConnect(SQLite()) # use in memory database for testing
# create two tables for purposes of this test
dbWriteTable(con, "BOD", BOD, row.names = FALSE)
dbWriteTable(con, "iris", iris, row.names = FALSE)
# get all table names and columns
tabinfo <- Map(function(tab) names(fn$dbGetQuery(con, "select * from $tab limit 0")),
dbListTables(con))
dbDisconnect(con)
giving an R list whose names are the table names and whose entries are the column names:
> tabinfo
$BOD
[1] "Time" "demand"
$iris
[1] "Sepal.Length" "Sepal.Width" "Petal.Length" "Petal.Width" "Species"
or perhaps long form output is preferred:
setNames(stack(tabinfo), c("column", "table"))
giving:
column table
1 Time BOD
2 demand BOD
3 Sepal.Length iris
4 Sepal.Width iris
5 Petal.Length iris
6 Petal.Width iris
7 Species iris

Answer 2

You could use the stringi package for this.
library(stringi)
# Your string vector
myString <- "SELECT *
FROM mydb.table1 m
LEFT JOIN mydb.sometable o ON m.id = o.id
LEFT JOIN mydb.sometable t ON p.id=t.id
LEFT JOIN otherdb.sometable s ON s.column='test'"
# Three stringi functions used
# stringi_extract_all_regex will extract the strings which have FROM or JOIN followed by some text till the next space
# string_replace_all_regex will replace all the FROM or JOIN followed by space with null string
# stringi_unique will extract all unique strings
t <- stri_unique(stri_replace_all_regex(stri_extract_all_regex(myString, "((FROM|JOIN) [^\\s]+)", simplify = TRUE),
"(FROM|JOIN) ", ""))
> t
[1] "mydb.table1" "mydb.sometable" "otherdb.sometable"