Misleading error for incompletely created tables about pg_shard HOT 2 CLOSED

Why did you expect to get zero as the result? You marked the table as distributed but created no shards…

I agree the error message is misleading, but believe that returning zero would be wrong. What if we had an error like "table designated as distributed but possesses no shards. Please run master_create_worker_shards to complete configuration of this distributed table"?

That's a little verbose but gets across the real reason for the error: the user needs to create shards after marking a table as distributed.

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From @samay-sharma on November 20, 2014 8:40

I expected zero because I didn't think of a distributed table without shards as being incompletely created. I just think of it as an empty distributed table.

That being said, I can see how this can be thought of as a incomplete configuration as the user needs to create shards before being able to use the distributed table. So, changing the error message sounds good.

For the error message, could we use something like "distributed table 'tablename' possesses no shards. Please run master_create_worker_shards to create shards for this table". This is just an alternative, please go ahead with whatever wording seems best to you.

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