Hey all, I was going to create a JIRA for this, but realized it's a symptom rather than a problem.
I had a friend ask me "Hey, how do I do a regex search in Drill?" I thought, well, look in the docs. And I go to string functions and it's not there...(Doc page last updated Jan 14, 2016) Then I thought... is there a way to do it... something is tickling my brain on this... and I searched and found a thread where Charles Givre helpfully pointed out that REGEX_MATCHES would work for me... It all came back to me, we need a better way to do function. Now, yes, Documentation needs to be updated, no doubt. However, its more than that, what functions should a doc person add to the docs? The opportunity for misses exist. So then I realized, hey I suggested a solution for this problem too. I added a request for sys.functions here: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-4258 and here https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-3988 So while this is a bit muddied by other requests as well, I want to point out that this issue here is important. Why? Well today, I was able to help my friend do a regex search, but he was my friend, and while I am good guy, not everyone is my friend. Thus, what happens when Drill could be the perfect tool for someone's use case, it has all the right things for them, but they give up on it because of a document miss. yes, we could say "let's document better" or we could say "let's build documentation into the code so it CAN'T be missed and saves time on documenting? This is one of those things where the doc pages could be regenerated after every page. If we included a field in sys.functions called "added in" we could even keep a ledger of what functions exist in what versions! This email hopefully is a call to arms to renew interest on my idea for sys.functions. Please feel free to poke holes here... my goals are to help make Drill easier for everyone! John
