Using 'end' as column name in Ruby on Rails (MySQL)

Question

I had an model with an "end" column (datetime format), only to discover that Heroku crashes and burns with illogical Active Record errors whenever I attempted to reference the column in a query. I spent two hours trying to debug the extremely simple query, after which point I renamed the column to "end_at" and all of my problems disappeared.

Has anybody else experienced this issue? I'm curious of the reasoning behind this and hope that we can help others avoid the same mistake. A similar question has been asked before, but a clear answer was not presented.

Answer 1

BEGIN and END are reserved words in Oracle and SQL Server, but not sure why MySQL doesn't consider them as such.

However that PGError would appear to indicate that the database engine itself (and not any Ruby-related runtime) has indeed rejected the query because of the "end".

Reserved words (and names containing spaces) can be used if quoted - perhaps Active Record didn't quote the identifiers in the SQL which was generated.

I would look at the log in MySQL (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/query-log.html) and see the statements generated.

And since the PGError means PostGreSQL and you mentioned Heroku (PostgreSQL 8.3) - I think this is because END is indeed a reserved word in PostgreSQL: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/sql-keywords-appendix.html

http://www.petefreitag.com/tools/sql_reserved_words_checker/?word=end