Re: [HACKERS] OSDN Database conference report (long)

"Rob S." <rslifka@home.com> writes:
>> ...  I thought this pointed up the need we've
>> been aware of for awhile to overhaul our error reporting.

> I'm not sure exactly where the error checking comes in.  I've been using
> Postgres in two places - at home (Apache/Tomcat) and at work (Apache/iASP)
> for the last 8 months or so.  The only gripe I have with error messages is
> that they could be more specific.  "Error near <some character that occurs
> 20+ times in the query>" is usually pretty useless =)  Otherwise, I can't
> recall a single time where I said, "man that message should be more clear".

The thing is that any error that the database itself issues is probably
database-centric; it may be helpful to the person coding the application,
but is unlikely to make a lot of sense to an end user.  So well-coded
apps typically want to substitute their own error messages --- say,
"please enter a positive value" rather than "rejected due to CHECK
constraint foo".  We need to provide more support for that.  A
consistent numbering scheme for error codes would help, for instance,
so that apps could just look at the error number and not be dependent
on pattern-matching against strings that the developers might reword
from time to time.

As I said, this has been on the todo list for awhile...

            regards, tom lane