SQLess: Dialect-Agnostic SQL Query Simplification

Abstract

Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are fundamental to numerous enterprise applications. Due to the significance of DBMSs, various testing techniques have been proposed to detect DBMS bugs. However, to trigger deep bugs, most of the existing techniques focus on generating lengthy and complex queries which burdens developers with the difficult of debugging. Therefore, SQL query simplification, which aims to reduce lengthy SQL queries without compromising their ability to detect bugs, is highly demanded. To bridge this gap, we introduce SQLess, an innovative approach that employs a dialect-agnostic method for efficient and semantically correct SQL query simplification tailored for various DBMSs. Unlike previous works that have to depend on DBMS-specific grammar, SQLess utilizes an adaptive parser, which leverages error recovery and grammar expansion to support DBMS dialects. Moreover, SQLess performs a semantics-sensitive SQL query trimming, which leverages alias and dependency analysis to simplify SQL queries with preserving bug-triggering capability. We evaluate SQLess using two datasets from the state-of-theart database bug detection studies, encompassing six widely-used DBMSs and over 32,000 complex SQL queries. The results demonstrate SQLess's superior performance: it achieves an average simplification rate of 72.45%, which significantly outperforms the stateof-the-art approaches by 84.91%.