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

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakangas(at)vmware(dot)com>, Michael Paquier <michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com>, Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, PostgreSQL mailing lists <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>, Ian Barwick <ian(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu>, Jim Nasby <jim(at)nasby(dot)net>, Albe Laurenz <laurenz(dot)albe(at)wien(dot)gv(dot)at>
Subject: Re: Doing better at HINTing an appropriate column within errorMissingColumn()
Date: 2014-11-19 01:03:34
Message-ID: 28099.1416359014@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 3:29 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
>>> postgres=# select qty from orderlines ;
>>> ERROR: 42703: column "qty" does not exist
>>> HINT: Perhaps you meant to reference the column "orderlines"."quantity".

>> I don't buy this example, because it would give you the same hint if
>> you told it you wanted to access a column called ant, or uay, or tit.
>> And that's clearly ridiculous. The reason why quantity looks like a
>> reasonable suggestion for qty is because it's a conventional
>> abbreviation, but an extremely high percentage of comparable cases
>> won't be.

> I maintain that omission of part of the correct spelling should be
> weighed less.

I would say that omission of the first letter should completely disqualify
suggestions based on this heuristic; but it might make sense to weight
omissions less after the first letter.

regards, tom lane

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