Re: Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count"

[Patrick Krecker <patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry, I changed the email as I was writing it but I forgot to change the subject line. An appropriate subject would be 'Strange behavior when referencing non-existent column foo."count".'

On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Patrick Krecker <patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I encountered this today and it was quite surprising:

select version();

                                               version                                                

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 PostgreSQL 9.3.5 on x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1) 4.8.2, 64-bit

create table foo as (select generate_series(1,3));

As expected, the following fails:

select count from foo;

ERROR:  column "count" does not exist

LINE 1: select count from foo;

               ^

But if I change the syntax to something I thought was equivalent:

select foo."count" from foo;

 count 

-------

     3

(1 row)

It works! This was quite surprising to me. Is this expected behavior, that you can call an aggregate function without any parentheses (I can't find any other syntax that works for count() sans parentheses, and this behavior doesn't occur for any other aggregate)?