I stumbled upon this problem today when trying out the SuiteCRM Rest API.
When searching for an account by it’s name I was using a search like this:

"name = 'Andrew'"

The API was returning a 500 error.
I dug into the suitecrm.log and found this:

where (name = 'Andrew') AND accounts.deleted=0: MySQL error 1052: Column 'name' in where clause is ambiguous

It seems that because of the joins, it can’t work out which ‘name’ we are talking about. Lets add the table name in and tada it works:

"accounts.name = 'Andrew'"