Hello Monty, all, We discussed this with Sergei and both think that it will be a good idea to deprecate this syntax: SELECT a'test'; where 'a' is an identifier and 'test' its alias. This is a non-standard way, and it conflicts with some other important standard SQL grammar. See below. Typified literals and a syntax conflict --------------------------------------- An identifier followed by a single-quoted text string is needed for typified literals: SELECT INET6'ffff::ffff'; We already support this for temporal literals, which is a part of the SQL standard: SELECT TIME'10:10:10'; SELECT TIMESTAMP'2001-01-01 10:20:30'; SELECT DATE'2001-01-01'; Note, the conflict already exists in MySQL and MariaDB. This script: DROP TABLE IF EXISTS t1; CREATE TABLE t1 (date date); INSERT INTO t1 VALUES ('2016-02-19'); SELECT date'2001-01-01' FROM t1; returns: +------------------+ | date'2001-01-01' | +------------------+ | 2001-01-01 | +------------------+ Notice, it returns a DATE literal, it does not return the value of the column t1.date using '2001-01-01' as an alias. Notice the difference: SELECT date`2001-01-01` FROM t1; +------------+ | 2001-01-01 | +------------+ | 2016-02-19 | +------------+ This is confusing. Shift-reduce conflicts ---------------------- By the way, the fact that we support single-quoted string as an alias is the reason for shift-reduce conflicts in sql_yacc.yy, because TIME/DATE/TIMESTAMP followed by 'string' can be interpreted in two ways: - a column name followed by an alias - an SQL-standard time literal What can be used instead ------------------------ We have a number of other ways to specify aliases: The standard ways: SELECT a AS test; SELECT a "test"; SELECT a AS "test"; MySQL/MariaDB extensions: SELECT a `test`; SELECT a AS `test`; That should be enough. Proposal -------- 1. In 10.1 we add a warning when a single-quoted string is used as a column alias. Something like this should work: Single quotes in a select sublist alias are deprecated. Use double quotes instead. 2. In 10.2 we disallow this syntax by default and add either sql_mode or old_mode to enable the old behavior. Sergei thinks that old_mode is something that should sooner or later be completely deleted. So perhaps sql_mode is better here, as the old behavior might be needed forever for MySQL compatibility. We'll appreciate your feedback. Thanks.