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

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Yeah, that's my point exactly.  There's no very good reason to assume that
> the intended answer is in fact among the set of column names we can see;
> and if it *is* there, the Levenshtein distance to it isn't going to be
> all that large.  I think that suggesting "foobar" when the user typed
> "glorp" is not only not helpful, but makes us look like idiots.

Maybe that's just a matter of phrasing the message appropriately. A
more guarded message, that suggests that "foobar" is the *best* match
is correct at least on its own terms (terms that are self evident).
This does pretty effectively communicate to the user that they should
totally rethink not just the column name, but perhaps the entire
query. On the other hand, showing nothing communicates nothing.


-- 
Peter Geoghegan