Splunk SQL to SPL

In this section, we will introduce the user to the SPL (Search Processing Language)
format and the various Splunk Search Commands styles. We also intend to help you
determine which form of the command will better match your question. It will help
you to understand the SPL and even its data types and use.

The Search Processing Language (SPL) has a wide range of search commands to choose
from, which helps the user to perform a wide variety of different jobs. The Splunk
platform allows its user to use an expansive processing language. This feature
enables a user to reduce and convert a massive amount of data from a dataset into
small pieces of information that are important and can be used to build reports.

It is not a perfect mapping between SQL and Splunk Search Processing Language
(SPL), but if you're familiar with SQL, this fast comparison might be useful as a
jump-start in using the search commands.

Concepts
No data is processed in a standard database by the Splunk platform. Instead, it
stores data with an implicit time dimension, in a distributed, non-relational,
semi-structured database. In the database world, however, there are analogs to many
of the concepts.

From SQL to Splunk SPL

SQL is designed to search column-consisting relational database tables. The SPL is
designed to scan for events consisting of fields. You often see examples in SQL
which use "mytable" and "mycolumn." You'll see examples in SPL which relate to
"fields." In these examples, the field "source" is used as a "table" proxy.
"Source" is the name of the file, stream, or other input in Splunk from which a
specific piece of data originates.

The searches in Search Processing Language hard

ly require the FIELDS command to filter out columns in the Splunk, since the user
interface provides a more convenient filtering method. The FIELDS command is used
for parallelism in the SPL Examples.

We need not to use the AND operator in boolean searches with SPL, because AND is
implied in terms between. However, they must be specified in uppercase when you use
the AND or OR operators.
There's no need to define SPL commands in uppercase. The commands are specified in
uppercase in those SPL examples for easier identification and clarity.
Data types
bool

The value of the < bool > argument represents the form of Boolean data. The 'real'
or 'fake' documentation is stated. In commands, other combinations of Boolean
values are accepted. For example, you can use 't,' 'T,' 'TRUE,' or the number one
'1' for 'true' too. You can use 'f', 'F', 'FALSE' or the number zero '0' for
'false.'

int

The value of the argument < int > represents the type of integral data.

num

The argument value of < num > represents the type of a number of the data.

float
The value of the < float > argument represents the type of float data.

Common syntax clauses

bin-span

Syntax:

span=(<span-length> | <log-span>)
Description: Sets the size of each bin.

Example: span=2d

Example: span=5m

Example: span=10

by-clause

Syntax:

by <field-list>
Description: Fields to group by.

For Example port, BY addr

The Search Processing Language has a wide range of search commands to choose from,
which helps the user to perform a wide variety of different jobs. The Splunk
platform provides an expansive processing language that allows a user to reduce and
convert a massive amount of data from a dataset into small pieces of information
that are important.

Splunk Search Pipeline

The "information pipeline" in the Splunk platform is a Splunk search structure that
contains a set of commands delimited by the pipe character present in the keyboard.

The quest consists of commands that are piped to another command, which helps in
the reduction and formulation of outcomes into something that the user needs.

At the beginning of the pipeline, a search for Splunk starts with search words. The
keywords, boolean expressions, phrases, key/value pairs, etc. are the search terms
that determine what events from the index(s) we want to retrieve from the database.

The collected events are then passed as inputs into a quest/search command, which
uses a pipe character in the Splunk platform for better searching. It will further
be converted into the results we need. The search command is inferred at the
beginning of a search pipeline, even though we do not state it directly. So if we
type: host="localhost "immediately, it will be completed as search host="
localhost. "

Fields
In the Splunk platform, results and events which flow through the Search pipeline
exist as a series of fields that are derived from the data that are present in the
platform. The fields contain value strings that are applicable to particular data
events and could be used to filter data alongside search commands. At the time of
searching, it can come from the Index. Also, it can be gathered from various
sources such as event types, regex extractions, tags, etc. A field name may be
present or absent for a given occurrence, where present it may include a single or
multiple string values.
Some important fields include the index, time, host, source, and raw.

Some notable fields are:

Null: A field not present on a given result or event. For this field, specific
events or outcomes in the same quest can have values.

Empty Field: An empty field is a field that consists of an empty value. It is

termed as an empty string.

Empty value: An empty string value, or ". This can also be represented as a string
of zero length.

Multivalue Fields: A area with a value greater than one. All fields that are non-
null contain an ordered list of strings. The typical case is, this is a one-value
list. It is a multivalue field if the list contains more than one entry.

Quotes and Escape Characters in Splunk

When there is a requiring assessment of the Whole string, then the quotes are used.
Splunk needs quotes that include white spaces, commas, pipes, quotes, or brackets
in field values. There must be a distinction between quotes.

The escape character (\) in the Splunk platform is used to escape from assessment
quotes, pipes, and itself when used while searching a string.

SPL Components
There are a few components in the search while we are writing a Search processing
Language, which is used to format or filter the data in the Splunk platform. The
quests that are included in the SPL have a combination of the various component.
Below is a list of the components.

Search Terms
To filter out what we want in our result, the terms of the searches have some
specific keywords or sentences. In Splunk, the search terms can be anything we are
interested in like they can be the name of the fields we want to search, maybe any
indexes in which we are interested.

Commands
When we want to take some action on the results such as altering, formatting,
renaming, sorting, etc. then we use commands. There's a variety of search commands
we might use, and the rest of the blog will address more.

Functions
Search functions are used along with commands to determine what kind of computation
is to be performed in specific fields. Typically functions are used alongside
statistical instructions, for example, stats.