Hey John, I COMPLETELY agree with this thread. We added an appendix to the forthcoming O’Reilly book which enumerates all the Drill functions. I had to scour the source code to find all the functions and I couldn’t believe how many functions are not documented anywhere.
SHAMELESS PLUG: You can pre-order here: https://amzn.to/2ODPtcq <https://amzn.to/2ODPtcq> > On Aug 2, 2018, at 10:08, John Omernik <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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
