[SPARK-6865] Decide on semantics for string identifiers in DataFrame API

• Type: Sub-task
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Blocker
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.4.0
• Component/s: SQL
• Target Version/s: 1.4.0
• Sprint: Spark 1.5 doc/QA sprint
• Assignee: Reynold Xin
• Reporter: Michael Armbrust
• Created: 11/Apr/15 21:10
• Updated: 14/Apr/15 06:15
• Resolved: 13/Apr/15 22:27

Description

There are two options:

• Quoted Identifiers: meaning that the strings are treated as though they were in backticks in SQL. Any weird characters (spaces, or, etc) are considered part of the identifier. Kind of weird given that `*` is already a special identifier explicitly allowed by the API
• Unquoted parsed identifiers: would allow users to specify things like tableAlias.* However, would also require explicit use of `backticks` for identifiers with weird characters in them.

Issue Links

• relates to: SPARK-5632 not able to resolve dot('.') in field name
• links to: [Github] Pull Request #5505 (rxin)