cannot use OR with absolute time in where clause

[beckettsean]

> select * from system_load1 where time = '2015-07-10T17:34:13.960621663Z'
name: system_load1
tags: host=catalyst
time                value
----                -----
2015-07-10T17:34:13.960621663Z  1.93

> select * from system_load1 where time = '2015-07-10T17:33:59.955702621Z'
name: system_load1
tags: host=catalyst
time                value
----                -----
2015-07-10T17:33:59.955702621Z  1.31

> select * from system_load1 where time = '2015-07-10T17:34:13.960621663Z' or time = '2015-07-10T17:33:59.955702621Z'
name: system_load1
tags: host=catalyst
time    value
----    -----

> 

[jsternberg]

The problem here is that the TimeRange function will only return one time range while this one effectively has multiple time ranges. I can modify it to use multiple time ranges, but it does bring up a pretty important question. If a time range doesn't have a start or end, what's the default? For the end, we've used now(), but what should be used for the beginning? If you do this:

SELECT mean(value) FROM cpu WHERE time < '2000-01-01T00:00:00Z' OR time >= now() - 10m GROUP BY time(1m)

While a bit nonsensical, it will give a very rude awakening when it tries to fill in every 1 minute interval from 1970 until 2000 along with the last 10 minutes.

[beckettsean]

@jsternberg to date, the assumed lower bound has always been epoch 0 unless otherwise specified. There are errors which fire on any query that has a GROUP BY clause but no WHERE time clause. There are also errors which fire if the number of GROUP BY buckets exceeds 99999.

Did we rip out those behaviors with the new query engine?

[jsternberg]

We don't currently have anything stopping queries from going out of control. I'd also argue that 99999 seems very high to begin with.

What kind of restrictions should we put on this?

[beckettsean]

@jsternberg I think this is a larger discussion to have with @jwilder and more of the team.

[jwilder]

This may be a option we should add to #6024

[jlennox]

This issue would be a good candidate for "Frequently Encountered Issues"

Should this condition be treated as an exception by influx?

[beckettsean]

Thanks for the suggestion, @jlennox.

I created influxdata/docs.influxdata.com-ARCHIVE#526 to get this into the docs.

[jwilder]

OR with multiple time ranges is not currently supported. This should return an error, but returning an error would be a breaking change to the query language. Fixing this needs to be done with care to not break the API.

[jsternberg]

I'm going to close this in favor of #7530. That includes the reason why this is an issue and includes the proposed fix in a way that I think is easier to understand.