If bitwise operations are forbidden in ADQL, what does the ampersand operator ('&') do?

Question

I read the http://www.ivoa.net/documents/latest/ADQL.html standard, and ampersand ('&') is an allowed operator, but it's not clear what it does.  When I try to use it for bitwise operations (which it is used for in standard SQL), my queries fail.

Answer 1

Hi Benjamin!

Thank you for your question.  I can confirm your experience.  The parser emits an error similar to:

"java.io.IOException: IllegalArgumentException: net.sf.jsqlparser.JSQLParserException JSQLParserException:" ... Encountered: "&" (38), after : "

So this operator looks like it is not implemented yet.   We will let the team know.

In the meantime, maybe try the query through our datalab command line client, or the API?  For the filters it's convenient to have bitwise logic available, but a workaround sometimes is easy just using decimal ranges.