Currently it's not possible to create an alias with the same name as a collection. You have to create a new collection first (copy of the existing), delete the collection, create the alias and point it to the cloned collection. I think the behavior of allowing an alias with the same name as the collection to be created would be more intuitive perhaps. It would automatically point to the collection of the same name and make it easier to transition from collections to aliases if you hadn't done so from the start. Perhaps there is a technical reason why it's not possible though 🙂

The reason we can't do this is because when making an API call like

/collections/xyz/documents/search

we can't tell if the intent was to use the alias

xyz

or collection

xyz

if we allowed the same name to be used for both entities.

Understood 👌 thanks Jason!