Re: PG12 change to DO UPDATE SET column references

On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 12:59 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> James Coleman <jtc331(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I do wonder if it's plausible (and sufficiently easy) to improve the
> > error message here. "column 'foo' of relation 'foo'" makes one thing
> > that you've written foo.foo, (in my real-world case the error message
> > also cut off the sql past "foo.", and so I couldn't even tell if the
> > sql was just malformed). At the very least it'd be nice to have a HINT
> > here (perhaps just when the relation and column name match).
>
> > Before I look at where it is, Is such an improvement something we'd be
> > interested in?
>
> A HINT if the bogus column name (1) matches the relation name and
> (2) is field-qualified seems plausible to me. Then it's pretty
> likely to be a user misunderstanding about whether to write the
> relation name.

Attached is a patch to do just that. We could also add tests for
regular UPDATEs if you think that's useful.

Regards,
James Coleman