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by dvdkon 789 days ago
Yes, the error messages of modern SQL databases suck. On that note, SQL itself sucks (the two problems might be related). But that's no excuse to not do better. Besides, BeeBase seems more user-focused than MariaDB, presenting itself as a nice GUI tool. "Real developers" might not need good error messages, but they also don't need a GUI and would sooner use some unholy bash-sed-awk-Perl mixture.
1 comments

Are you aware of non SQL databases that give detailed errors?
Fair point. Databases encoding queries in JSON get some error messages for free, at least when it comes to "syntax". But I think even others do well.

I just logged into Grafana and tried writing a simple query. Upon failing I got a reasonably detailed and specific error message: 'parse error: expected type range vector in call to function "rate", got instant vector'.

I also tried XQuery in Xidel and it gave me nicely descriptive responses to whichever mistakes I introduced.