Re: bad error message

On Oct 12, 2006, at 3:44 PM, A. Kretschmer wrote:

> Can you show us your SQL? The message is clear: you create a new table
> with a foreign key to an other table that doesn't exist. An example:

Yes, I know that part. The error message is bad though, because it
doesn't tell me exactly where the error is.

I got as an error
ERROR: column "id" referenced in foreign key constraint does not exist

I should have gotten something like
ERROR: column "id" referenced in foreign key constraint on column
"xyz" table "abc" does not exist

( the table "abc" is not necessary, i just wanted to be explicit
about the message )

In that create table statement, i had 10 columns each referencing an
'id' in another column. I like very normalized DBs.

I had to go through each column individually to see where my error
was. Postgres should have immediately told me which of the source
table columns that constraint failed on-- not just about the target
column name.