I actually have a PR that would work in conjunction with listing for the WebUI's auto-complete feature. I had based it off an original PR meant for providing descriptions to System options, but since that has got stuck in review and rework, I've not made new progress on this.
We'll definitely have it before 1.15 release. ~ Kunal On 8/2/2018 7:25:49 AM, Charles Givre <cgi...@gmail.com> wrote: 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 > On Aug 2, 2018, at 10:08, John Omernik 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
