David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 3:43 PM Ron <ronljohnsonjr@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> >> How does one go about syntax checking this? >> >> (There are 222 ALTER TABLE ADD FOREIGN KEY statements that I'm wrapping in >> similar DO blocks, and want to make sure the statements are clean.) >> >> > Begin a transaction, execute the DO, capture an error if there is one, > rollback the transaction. > As David points out, wrapping the whole thing in a transaction will at least guarantee it all succeeds or it is all rollled back. This can be frustrating if the statements are slow and there are a lot of them as it can result in a very tedious do-run-fix cycle. Something which can help is using an editor with good font highlighting and parsing support. One interesting area I've not yet looked at is the development of LSP (Language Server Protocol) servers for SQL. I've used LSP for other languages with great success. The challenge with databases is that there is enough variation between different vendor implementations to make accurate parsing and validation tedious to implement, so most solutions only focus on ANSI compliance. Still, that can be very useful. See https://github.com/lighttiger2505/sqls for one example of an LSP server for SQL and https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ for more background on LSP and what it can provide. Many editors, including VSCode, VI, Emacs, TextMate etc now have some support for LSP. -- Tim Cross
