I benchmarked every Go SQL parser in 2026 and built my own

A comparison of xwb1989/sqlparser, pganalyze/pg_query_go, TiDB's parser, and GoSQLX - with real benchmark numbers, trade-off analysis, and code. Disclosure: I'm the author of GoSQLX, so weight this comparison accordingly. Why I needed a SQL parser I was building a query analysis system in Go. The requirements were straightforward: Parse SQL from multiple databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL Server Handle 1M+ queries per day without becoming a bottleneck Produce a structured AST I could walk programmatically No cgo - we deploy to environments where cross-compilation matters Actively maintained - I didn't want to maintain a fork I expected to find a mature ecosystem. What I found was more fragmented than I expected. Here's my experience evaluating each option, and how I ended up writing GoSQLX. The landscape: what actually exists Before benchmarking anything, I catalogued every option. xwb1989/sqlparser (~1,580 stars) The most-starred pure Go SQL parser. It's a port of Vitess's MySQ