Ambiguous reference

Reports columns that have identical names but belong to different tables.

Example (MySQL):

CREATE TABLE foo(id INT PRIMARY KEY);
CREATE TABLE bar(id INT PRIMARY KEY);

SELECT foo.id, bar.id FROM foo, bar WHERE id > 0;

The id column appears in foo and bar tables. You need to qualify the column name to make the query correct.

SELECT foo.id, bar.id FROM foo, bar WHERE foo.id > 0;

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

SqlAmbiguousColumn

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | SQL

Inspection ID: SqlAmbiguousColumnInspection

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection SqlAmbiguousColumn

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2025.3, DataGrip 2025.3, DataSpell 2025.3, GoLand 2025.3, IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, JetBrains Rider 2025.2, PhpStorm 2025.3, PyCharm 2025.3, Qodana for .NET 2025.2, Qodana for Go 2025.3, Qodana for JS 2025.3, Qodana for JVM 2025.3, Qodana for PHP 2025.3, Qodana for Ruby 2025.3, RubyMine 2025.3, WebStorm 2025.3

Last modified: 03 December 2025