[jira] [Created] (ASTERIXDB-2482) Insufficiently helpful error message in GROUP BY query

["Michael J. Carey (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Michael J. Carey created ASTERIXDB-2482:
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             Summary: Insufficiently helpful error message in GROUP BY query
                 Key: ASTERIXDB-2482
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ASTERIXDB-2482
             Project: Apache AsterixDB
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: *DB - AsterixDB, COMP - Compiler, DOC - Documentation, SQL - Translator SQL++
            Reporter: Michael J. Carey
            Assignee: Dmitry Lychagin


use cs122aSchema;
 //Hi Professor Carey, if you uncomment the post.post_id
 //part of the query below the program will give the
 //error "Cannot resolve ambiguous alias reference for 
 //undefined identifier post in [#2, $user_id]"

//[CompilationException]

SELECT /* post.post_id, */ MAX(post.popularity)
 FROM User user, Post post 
 WHERE user.user_id = post.user_id
 AND user.title = "Professor"
 AND user.phone IS MISSING
 GROUP BY user.user_id;

This is a "bad" error message in terms of user experience - it isn't clear to a normal human why the the variable name "post" could be ambiguous - instead they are thinking "how could I possibly be clearer than "post.user_id"?"  I realize this is related to visibility of things after the GROUP BY clause, but an error message that conveys that as the issue would be much more helpful.  I suspect that this will happen a lot to new users trying to do analytics with AsterixDB.

I wonder if there are a few sentences that could go in the docs that could help as well?

 



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