Re: ERROR: invalid value "????" for "YYYY"

[Brian Wong <bwong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that clearly it is getting "pg_statistic" from the pg_catalog schema and feeding it to the query.  So "tatistic" gets extracted, being the last 8 characters.  And then "tati" is fed to the YYYY part of the to_date function.  But I already specify the table_schema to be the one that I want.  So those internal pg_* views shouldn't even show up in the query.

Brian

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Brian Wong <bwong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm posting this question to pgsql-general.  Hopefully someone can share some insights with me.

I have a bunch of tables in the database and in a separate schema.  The tables' names are in this format:

???_???_???_YYYYMMDD

where the last 8 characters is a date.

When I query either the information_schema.tables or pg_tables extracting the last 8 characters out and converting it to a date, it works:

select table_name, to_date(right(table_name, 8), 'YYYYMMDD') blah
from information_schema.tables
where table_schema = '????'
and table_catalog = '????';

But as soon as I reference it in the where clause, it gives a weird error:

select table_name, to_date(right(table_name, 8), 'YYYYMMDD') blah
from information_schema.tables
where table_schema = '????'
and table_catalog = '????'
and to_date(right(table_name, 8), 'YYYYMMDD') is not null;

ERROR:  invalid value "tati" for "YYYY"
DETAIL:  Value must be an integer.

It seems like some strange values were passed into the to_date function, but I'm seeing that the rightmost 8 characters of all the table names are dates.  So only date strings are passed to the to_date function.  Absolutely nothing containing the string "tati" is passed to the to_date function.  What is going on?  Is that a bug?

Brian