Re: Doing better at HINTing an appropriate column within errorMissingColumn()

Andres Freund-3 wrote
> I think something simplistic like levenshtein, even with modified
> distances, is good to catch typos. But not to find terms that are
> related in more complex ways.

Tom Lane-2 wrote
> The big picture is that this is more or less our first venture into
> heuristic suggestions. I think we should start slow with a very
> conservative set of heuristics. If it's a success maybe we can get more
> aggressive over time --- but if we go over the top here, the entire
> concept will be discredited in this community for the next ten years.

+1 for both of these conclusions.

The observations regarding standard column prefixes and thinking that
abbreviations are in use when in fact the names are spelled out are indeed
in-the-wild behaviors that should be considered but a levenshtein distance
algorithm is likely not going to be useful in pointing out mistakes in those
situations. Limiting the immediate focus to "fat/thin-fingering of keys" -
for which levenshtein is well suited - is useful and will provide data
points that can then guide future artificial intelligence endeavors.

David J.

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