Niels Berglund takes us through an odd “incorrect syntax” error with PolyBase:
What we see in Figure 1, incorrect syntax exception, is strange, as I have executed the same code in a SQL Server 2019 Big Data Cluster, (BDC), without any issues, and the forum poster executed the same in SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition also without any issues.
Ok, but what about creating an external table against a relational data source – where we do not need to define an external file format?
There is a straightforward answer as to why the specific error message pops up, but I agree with Niels that it’d be nice to have “here’s the problem and here’s the solution” types of error messages. The deeper you get into the product—especially the older Hadoop external data source—the worse the error messages get.