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Identifier Case Sensitivity

In BodoSQL, by default all identifiers not wrapped in quotes are automatically converted to upper case. If you are a Snowflake user who is using either the Snowflake Catalog or Table Path API, then this should not impact you and the rules will be the same as Snowflake (i.e. identifiers are case-insensitive unless wrapped in quotes during table creation). See here for the Snowflake documentation..

This means that the following queries are equivalent:

SELECT A FROM table1

SELECT a FROM TABLE1

When providing column or table names, identifiers will only match if the original name is in uppercase For example, the following code will fail to compile because there is no match for TABLE1:

@bodo.jit
def f(filename):
    df1 = pd.read_parquet(filename)
    bc = bodosql.BodoSQLContext({"table1": df1})
    return bc.sql("SELECT A FROM table1")

To match non-uppercase names you can use quotes to specify the name exactly as it appears in the BodoSQLContext definition or the columns of a DataFrame. For example:

@bodo.jit
def f(filename):
    df1 = pd.read_parquet(filename)
    bc = bodosql.BodoSQLContext({"table1": df1})
    return bc.sql("SELECT A FROM \"table1\"")

Similarly if you want an alias to be case sensitive then you will also need it to be wrapped in quotes:

SELECT A as "myIdentifier" FROM table1

If you provide DataFrames directly from Python or are using the TablePath API to load Parquet files, then please be advised that the column names will be required to match exactly and for ease of use we highly recommend using uppercase column names.

BodoSQL's identifier handling behavior can be controlled by an environment variable BODO_SQL_STYLE which has two currently supported values:

  • SNOWFLAKE (the default)
  • SPARK

If BODO_SQL_STYLE is set to SPARK, then a different set of case sensitivity rules will be used:

  • Identifiers, both with and without quotes, will not have their casing altered.
  • All identifier matching is case-insensitive.