Yesterday I submitted a new question of the day based on the best idea generator you can find – something that went wrong at work. It had the added merit of having an error message that didn’t clearly state the problem. Once you have the problem and the answer then it’s just a matter of writing the story, the answers, and the explanation. I say just, because it’s still not easy. For this one I deliberately tried to eliminate all the common debugging steps that I think an average DBA would try. I like having more than one answer that is correct, I think it makes it harder and more interesting (or more aggravating perhaps). I like to put in obvious wrong answers that are obvious if you know the topic – but tempting answers if you don’t! The explanation is the easy part and I’ve started adding an “about the question” section to explain how/why I wrote it and asking for feedback.

The title I submitted was “Access Granted or Not?” if you want to study ahead of time, not sure when it will be published.