syntaqlite

A parser, formatter, validator, and language server for SQLite SQL, built on SQLite's own grammar and tokenizer. If SQLite accepts it, syntaqlite parses it. If SQLite rejects it, so does syntaqlite, including syntax gated behind specific versions and compile-time flags.

Note: syntaqlite is at 0.x. APIs and CLI flags may change before 1.0.

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'?

# RETURNING was added in SQLite 3.35.0
# Android 13 ships SQLite 3.32.2 — catch the mismatch:
syntaqlite --sqlite-version 3.32.0 validate \
  -e "DELETE FROM users WHERE id = 1 RETURNING *;"

error: syntax error near 'RETURNING'
 --> <stdin>:1:32
  |
1 | DELETE FROM users WHERE id = 1 RETURNING *;
  |                                ^~~~~~~~~

def get_user_stats(user_id: int):
    return conn.execute(
        f"SELECT nme, ROUDN(score, 2) FROM users WHERE id = {user_id}"
    )

warning: unknown function 'ROUDN'
 --> app.py:3:23
  |
3 |         f"SELECT nme, ROUDN(score, 2) FROM users WHERE id = {user_id}"
  |                       ^~~~~
  = 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