syntaqlite

A parser, formatter, validator, and language server (LSP) for SQLite SQL — built directly from SQLite's own tokenizer and grammar rules, not an approximation. If SQLite accepts it, syntaqlite parses it, including syntax gated behind specific versions and compile-time flags.

What it does

select u.id, u.name, p.title
from users u join posts p
on u.id=p.user_id
where u.active=1
and p.published=true
order by p.created_at desc
limit 10

SELECT u.id, u.name, p.title
FROM users u
  JOIN posts p ON u.id = p.user_id
WHERE u.active = 1
  AND p.published = true
ORDER BY p.created_at DESC
LIMIT 10;

CREATE TABLE orders (id, status, total, created_at);

WITH
  monthly_stats(month, revenue, order_count) AS (
    SELECT strftime('%Y-%m', o.created_at), SUM(o.total)
    FROM orders o WHERE o.status = 'completed'
    GROUP BY strftime('%Y-%m', o.created_at)
  )
SELECT ms.month, ms.revenue, ms.order_count,
  ROUDN(ms.revenue / ms.order_count, 2) AS avg_order
FROM monthly_stats ms;

Error: in prepare, table monthly_stats
has 2 values for 3 columns

error: table 'monthly_stats' has 2
      values for 3 columns
  |
2 | monthly_stats(month, revenue,
  | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~

warning: unknown function 'ROUDN'
   |
14 | ROUDN(ms.revenue / ms.order_count,
   | ^~~~~
   = help: did you mean 'round'?

SelectStmt
  columns:
    ResultColumn
      expr:
        ColumnRef
          column: "id"
    ResultColumn
      expr:
        ColumnRef
          column: "name"
  from_clause:
    TableRef
      table_name: "users"
  where_clause:
    BinaryExpr
      op: EQ
      left:
        ColumnRef
          column: "active"
      right:
        Literal "1"

# VS Code — install from the marketplace
ext install syntaqlite.syntaqlite

# Any editor — point your LSP client at:
syntaqlite lsp

Design principles

• Reliability — uses SQLite's own tokenizer and grammar rules, verified by running the full SQLite test suite through the parser.
• Speed — parses 3,500 lines of SQL in 2.6ms, formats in 4.9ms, validates in 7.3ms. Faster than sqlite3 itself for validation. Zero-copy tokenizer, arena-allocated parser, Wadler-Lindig formatter — all allocations are reused across inputs.
• Portability — no runtime dependencies beyond the C and Rust standard libraries. Runs natively, in WASM, and as a shared library.
• Extensibility — the grammar system supports database engines that extend SQLite's syntax. Define custom grammar rules, AST nodes, and formatting recipes, then load your dialect as a shared library at runtime.

syntaqlite grew out of 8+ years of maintaining PerfettoSQL and scaling it to 100K+ line SQL codebases. See the comparison for how it stacks up against other tools.

What it does not do

• It does not support other SQL engines. syntaqlite is SQLite-only by design — this is what allows it to use the real grammar rather than a lowest-common-denominator subset.
• It does not do runtime type checking. It catches what sqlite3_prepare catches (syntax errors, unknown names), not data-dependent errors like division by zero or type mismatches.

Get started

Pick your starting point:

Further reading