PostgreSQL syntax check without running the query

I recently wrote up a utility to statically check the syntax of SQL for PostgreSQL. It leverages ecpg, the embedded SQL C preproccessor for postgres, to check the SQL syntax, so it uses the exact same parser that is built in to Postgres itself.

You can check it out on github: http://github.com/markdrago/pgsanity. You can give the README a skim to get a better idea of how it works and to get directions for how to install it. Here's a short example of how pgsanity can be used:

$ pgsanity good1.sql good2.sql bad.sqlbad.sql: line 1: ERROR: syntax error at or near "bogus_token"$ find -name '*.sql' | xargs pgsanity./sql/bad1.sql: line 59: ERROR: syntax error at or near ";"./sql/bad2.sql: line 41: ERROR: syntax error at or near "insert"./sql/bad3.sql: line 57: ERROR: syntax error at or near "update"

Use this trick to validate PostgreSQL code syntax:

DO $SYNTAX_CHECK$ BEGIN RETURN;    -- insert your SQL code hereEND; $SYNTAX_CHECK$;

Function is_sql(sql text)

One way would be to put it into a transaction that you roll back at the end:

BEGIN;<query>;<query>;<query>;ROLLBACK;

Be aware that there are some effects that cannot be rolled back, like dblink calls, or anything written to the file system or incremented sequences.

I would advise cloning your database for testing purposes.