Unexpected error in BigQuery comparisons

Question

I was running the following query against the public dataset github_nested, and I got an error: "Unexpected. Please try again"

SELECT IF(payload.pages.action < 'a', 3, -3) test
FROM FLATTEN([publicdata:samples.github_nested], payload.pages)

But when I changed less than to greater than, i.e.,

SELECT IF(payload.pages.action > 'a', 3, -3) test
FROM FLATTEN([publicdata:samples.github_nested], payload.pages)

It returned me something.

What's wrong here?

Answer 1

Looks like a bug. I've reported it internally, and we'll see if we can get it resolved. Thanks for the report!