PostgreSQL: ERROR: Column Does Not Exist

Mark Needham

Oct. 07, 14 · Interview

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I’ve been playing around with PostgreSQL recently and in particular the Northwind dataset typically used as an introductory data set for relational databases.

Having imported the data I wanted to take a quick look at the employees table:

postgres=# SELECT * FROM employees LIMIT 1;
 EmployeeID | LastName | FirstName |        Title         | TitleOfCourtesy | BirthDate  |  HireDate  |           Address           |  City   | Region | PostalCode | Country |   HomePhone    | Extension | Photo |                                                                                      Notes                                                                                      | ReportsTo |              PhotoPath               
------------+----------+-----------+----------------------+-----------------+------------+------------+-----------------------------+---------+--------+------------+---------+----------------+-----------+-------+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+-----------+--------------------------------------
          1 | Davolio  | Nancy     | Sales Representative | Ms.             | 1948-12-08 | 1992-05-01 | 507 - 20th Ave. E.\nApt. 2A | Seattle | WA     | 98122      | USA     | (206) 555-9857 | 5467      | \x    | Education includes a BA IN psychology FROM Colorado State University IN 1970.  She also completed "The Art of the Cold Call."  Nancy IS a member OF Toastmasters International. |         2 | http://accweb/emmployees/davolio.bmp
(1 ROW)

That works fine but what if I only want to return the ‘EmployeeID’ field?

postgres=# SELECT EmployeeID FROM employees LIMIT 1;
ERROR:  COLUMN "employeeid" does NOT exist
LINE 1: SELECT EmployeeID FROM employees LIMIT 1;

I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten) that field names get lower cased so we need to quote the name if it’s been stored in mixed case:

postgres=# SELECT "EmployeeID" FROM employees LIMIT 1;
 EmployeeID 
------------
          1
(1 ROW)

From my reading the suggestion seems to be to have your field names lower cased to avoid this problem but since it’s just a dummy data set I guess I’ll just put up with the quoting overhead for now.

PostgreSQL Relational database Database

Published at DZone with permission of Mark Needham, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

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