[Backward Incompatible]Calcite 1.37 → 1.39 bump introduces new reserved keywords & bracket-modifier syntax changes

[praveenc7]

Background

Pinot now ships with Calcite 1.39 (via #15263 · #15615 · #15942).
While build-breaking API shifts are easy to catch, some parser changes don’t surface until user queries start failing.
This issue documents the backwards-incompatible deltas introduced since Calcite 1.37, summarizes user impact

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Affected Versions

Component	Old	New	Introduced by
Calcite	1.37	1.39	#15263 (merged 2025-04-24)
	1.39	1.40	#15942 (merged 2025-05-29)
Parser tweaks	–	–	#15615 (merged 2025-04-28)

Any Pinot build after 2025-04-24 contains the changes below.

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🚨 Breaking / Incompatible Changes

Category	Detail	Before (✅)	After (❌ then ✅)
New reserved keywords	ASOF, VARIANT, UUID, MATCH_CONDITION, MEASURE are now keywords. Must be double-quoted when used as identifiers.	SELECT VARIANT FROM t;	SELECT VARIANT FROM t; ❌ SELECT "VARIANT" FROM t; ✅
Bracket modifiers require parentheses	OFFSET, ORDINAL, SAFE_OFFSET, SAFE_ORDINAL now must wrap the argument in ().	arr[OFFSET 3]	arr[OFFSET 3] ❌ arr[OFFSET(3)] ✅

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🔍 Reproduction

-- fails on Calcite 1.39+
SELECT VARIANT FROM events;

-- fails on Calcite 1.39+
SELECT arr[OFFSET 1] FROM my_table;

Error
org.apache.calcite.sql.parser.SqlParseException:
Encountered "VARIANT" at line 1, column 8.
Was expecting one of: <expression> ...

cc : UOETianleZhang who did the investigation

Impact

We saw multiple tables using keywords like variant saw queries failing because of this incompatible change and caused a incident for us at Linkedin.

Tagging the original author : @yashmayya

[praveenc7]

cc : @siddharthteotia @vvivekiyer @Jackie-Jiang

[yashmayya]

@praveenc7 since Pinot doesn't support the VARIANT / UUID types I suppose it might be alright to modify the parser generator file and comment out those reserved keywords if we want to preserve backward compatibility (this change hasn't been released yet in an official OSS release). Same for the AS MEASURE clause. We did add support for ASOF / MATCH_CONDITION though (#15630) so that can't be changed. As for the other change (Bracket modifiers require parentheses), is that really relevant to Pinot given we don't have actual support for array types?

cc - @Jackie-Jiang @gortiz

[praveenc7]

@yashmayya For us, we have mostly seen query failing with those keywords. We build of master and have effected our deployment.

Would commenting out of the keyword be a safe operation and not add any performance penalty, if so that would help us unblock till we figure out a medium/long term solution before the next release and how we want to surface this new changes from calcite

[yashmayya]

Would commenting out of the keyword a safe operation and not add any performance penalty,

Yeah it should be safe if it's something not being used by Pinot and no it shouldn't have any performance impact. The relevant files are here (they're all copied over from Calcite with some slight modifications for Pinot specific use cases) - https://github.com/apache/pinot/tree/a02253d671d7781acc16b81628e51bd11a3005a0/pinot-common/src/main/codegen

[yashmayya]

Closing this issue since #16470 fixes the main problem described here.