Re: [HACKERS] Misleading Error Message

> Hi all. Was working tonight and ran into the following error. Doing a
> union between two selects (to get around the lack of outer joins - hint
> hint), I was getting the error:
>
> ERROR: Each UNION clause must have the same number of columns
>
> Upon examining the SQL statement in question, I verified that it did,
> indeed, have the same number of columns. After some fiddling, I found the
> actual problem was that I was doing an ORDER BY on a column which was not
> being included in the two select statements. Unfortunately, the error
> message wasn't pointing at that.
>
> I'm not sure if this is just a simple change or implies other problems
> with the parser but I thought I'd toss it out onto the pile.

Tom Lane discovered it a few days ago in relation to INSERT INTO table
SELECT * FROM TABLE ORDER BY col1, and col1 was not in the select target
list. It shows an error. We are looking at solutions.

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