The bq command has a confusing error message when presented with a statement it doesn't support

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What steps will reproduce the problem?

jeffsilverman@jeffsdesktop:~$ bq query "INSERT INTO 
Baby_names.Baby_names_1982_rev_a ( name, gender, count ) VALUES 
('Xyzzy','M',1);"
Waiting on job_8275e44b1a4245419fc1e02d03baa3f1 ... (0s) Current status: DONE   
Error in query string: Encountered "" at line 1, column 48.
Was expecting one of:

jeffsilverman@jeffsdesktop:~$ bq query "INSERT INTO 
Baby_names.Baby_names_1982_rev_a (name, gender, count ) VALUES ('Xyzzy','M',1);"
Waiting on job_dabd6eed004f4450b014a92dd351e715 ... (0s) Current status: DONE   
Error in query string: Encountered "" at line 1, column 47.
Was expecting one of:

jeffsilverman@jeffsdesktop:~$ bq query "INSERT INTO 
Baby_names.Baby_names_1982_rev_a(name, gender, count ) VALUES ('Xyzzy','M',1);"
Waiting on job_aff3af2feb3b445baf111bb241c48457 ... (0s) Current status: DONE   
Error in query string: Encountered "" at line 1, column 46.
Was expecting one of:

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I would expect an error message that INSERT is not supported.  Instead, I see a 
very confusing error message about an error in the query string.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
This is BigQuery CLI v2.0.6
Goobuntu linux 10.04
python 2.6.5

Please provide any additional information below.
If BigQuery doesn't support UPDATE or DELETE, then those statements should also 
generate error messages.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jeffsilverman@google.com on 25 Jul 2012 at 11:44

[GoogleCodeExporter]

This poor error message is reproducible at https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/

Closing out since this isn't a client issue.

Thanks for the bug report: I've moved this issue to the internal issue tracker 
for the BigQuery service.

Original comment by mshel...@google.com on 31 Jul 2012 at 12:56

• Changed state: Invalid