Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count" - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Patrick Krecker
Subject Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count"
Date
Msg-id CAK2mJFOsGAXzTMw4ot2Va+en-c=a+UBpPFEcqvWdRvXTsd4SFQ@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count"
Re: Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count"
Re: Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count"
List pgsql-general
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)?

pgsql-general by date:

Previous
From: Merlin Moncure
Date:
Subject: Re: Storing Video's or vedio file in DB.
Next
From: Patrick Krecker
Date:
Subject: Re: Strange error message when reference non-existent column foo."count"