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

On 14/06/17 11:57, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 7:09 PM, Ian Barwick <ian(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> Howver in this particular use case, as long as it doesn't produce false
>> positives (I haven't looked at the patch) I don't think it would cause
>> any problems (of the kind which would require actively excluding certain
>> languages/character sets), it just wouldn't be quite as useful.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by false positives. The patch just shows a
> HINT, where before there was none. It's possible for any number of
> reasons that it isn't the most useful possible suggestion, since
> Levenshtein distance is used as opposed to any other scheme that might
> be better sometimes. I think that the hint given is a generally useful
> piece of information in the event of an ERRCODE_UNDEFINED_COLUMN
> error. Obviously I think the patch is worthwhile, but fundamentally
> the HINT given is just a guess, as with the existing HINTs.

I mean, does it come up with a suggestion in every case, even if there is
no remotely similar column? E.g. would

SELECT foo FROM some_table

bring up column "bar" as a suggestion if "bar" is the only column in
the table?

Anyway, is there an up-to-date version of the patch available? The one from
March doesn't seem to apply cleanly to HEAD.

Thanks

Ian Barwick

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