Wrong-Errors Bugs: A New Class of Bug? (O'Reilly)

[Posted September 8, 2004 by cook]

Dan Tow uncovers a new type of database bug on O'Reilly. "In this article, I propose the recognition of a new class of bug, a class that is not generally considered a bug at all. Specifically, I propose that errors such as attempted conversions of unconvertible values or division-by-zero should appear only when absolutely necessary, when any execution plan conceivable would encounter the error. An SQL statement that returned an unnecessary error (an error that would not result from every conceivable path to the data) would be guilty of this new class of bug, a wrong-errors bug."

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