I thought I had a bug report, but I found an email conversion that suggested PARSE {sql} as a statement that just returns a JSON representation o the lex structure to have some wider uses and being 100% accurate with what the server has actually done.

I've been thinking of the best way to approach this, there are a few options, in order

1) Embrace/extend https://metacpan.org/pod/DBIx%3A%3AMyParsePP

2) Alter EXPLAIN $query in some way, PARSE $query might be clearer. One of my thoughts was to post process EXPLAIN output, but i don't think that would be very maintainable.

3) Use a generic sql parser and try and deal with the resultant deluge of errors. Not a great option, might be useful as a proof of concept.

Initial use case is to extend MTR coverage by replacing table references in existing test queries with

s.