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I've got a large (3 GB) SQL file that came from a SQL dump. Reading it is impossible because it's formatted poorly. For example each table has a giant INSERT statement that is indecipherable.

Is there a CLI tool available for Linux that can automatically format this thing? Maybe something like jq but operates on a SQL file instead of JSON?

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There used to be a few of them available, but I haven't tried any of them personally for a while. Therefore I do not know how well they can handle multi-gigabyte SQL dumps.

I remember, for Node.js/JavaScript there is sql-formatter. See also the README on GitHub.

You could also search for "SQL beautifiers". The search results mention a lot of online-formatters, but these are targeted at smaller queries, single SQL statements. I haven't looked closely though. Maybe there is an offline beautifier among them.

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  • Thanks yeah of all the online formatters, only one had a local tool and it was a "premium" tool. I tried probably a dozen different tools I found on github, including one that I use in other places (prettier from npm) but it chokes at 2.5 GB of SQL
    – Freedom_Ben
    Apr 22, 2022 at 1:41
  • @Freedom_Ben: perhaps you can split the multi-GB SQL file manually into a few 100-MB Files, then try again. Split with sed, or perl, or some other tool. - Besides, In VScode you can also "Format Selection", but this would mean that the Editor opens/loads the file efficiently.
    – knb
    Apr 22, 2022 at 9:15

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