'true' and 'false' quietly (?) removed/broken in InfluxDB 1.4.x

[davidgubler]

Bug report

System info: InfluxDB 1.4.2 on Ubuntu 16.04

Steps to reproduce:

This query used to work on InfluxDB 1.3.7:
SELECT * FROM aggregate.aggregate_project WHERE true AND (false OR product = 'fooproduct:v1') AND time >= 1510614000000000000

On InfluxDB 1.4.2, I get:
ERR: invalid condition expression: true
If I remove the 'true AND', I get:
ERR: invalid condition expression: false
If I remove the 'false OR', the query works.

Either the 'true' and 'false' was removed from InfluxDB 1.4.x, or it is broken. I could not find any documentation about this.

In case you are wondering: I am assembling the queries programmatically. There are cases where it is much simpler to just add 'true' or 'false', because then the rest of the query can remain the same.
E.g.:
SELECT * FROM aggregate.aggregate_project WHERE customer='foo' AND (false OR product = 'fooproduct:v1') AND time >= 1510614000000000000
Now I want the same query, but I don't care about the customer. So I insert 'true' instead and therefore I can leave the rest of the query the same.
SELECT * FROM aggregate.aggregate_project WHERE true AND (false OR product = 'fooproduct:v1') AND time >= 1510614000000000000
Such an approach works fine in pretty much all other databases, therefore I expect InfluxDB 1.4.x+ to support this, too, especially since it worked in 1.3.x.

[jsternberg]

@rbetts the fix for this will likely need a backport.

[prokod]

Hi, Any estimates on when it will be available for 1.4.x as an updated rpm ?

[prokod]

Hi @jsternberg I have compiled influx from latest branch 1.4 (commit 0dac738) which includes this bug fix and even though,
when querying:
SELECT * from cs_daily_prg_global WHERE time >= 1514419200000000000
I get a result set with some data points returned as expected.
when querying:
SELECT * from cs_daily_prg_global WHERE time >= 1514419200000000000 AND true
I get empty result set. I would expect it will return the same set as above.
when querying:
SELECT * from cs_daily_prg_global WHERE time >= 1514419200000000000 AND 1 = 1
I get ERR: invalid condition expression. I would expect 1 = 1 to be reduced to true

In case you are wondering: We have created numerous Grafana dashboards based on Influx DB 1.2/3 and we have used this literal binary expression evaluation within InfluxQL to reduce the amount of queries needed for each Grafana Panel when using multiple template variables.