Some of your dopiest (sp) Newbie goof ups
-
I find that many of the experts on this site can be somewhat intimidating due to their incredible depth of knowledge. But all of us started out naked and totally dependent.
To that end, what are some of the dopiest (dopey - est) things people have done in their careers? 
When I was starting out, we were building a psuedo-datawarehouse. We would TRUNCATE the tables and repopulate them with Production. When I first started testing this SP, I did not check the database I was working within.... yep, I TRUNCATED Production!
Then I got upset because I could not query Production to see if the two db's matched... Doh!
I had to send out an email explaining what I did...
I got the monicur "Truncate Timmy" for a long time in that job... Thank God we had a back up and only a bit of work-time was lost. It was humiliating, but made learn to TEST before I do and taught me how to use system functions and tables to know what db I was working within... (I have also UPDATED without a WHERE clause - again, I learned to BEGIN TRANSACTION Name ..... ROLLBACK TRANSACTION Name to test counts and errors -- that is probably the most common error I hear from beginners...). I am guessing there are some pretty funny goof-ups out there..., even from some of our true Guru's...
Hope you have the ego's to 'fess up and give us a good laugh. I wasn't born stupid - I had to study.
-
I have a similar story. My first job was working with DB2 and I was given the task of writting a housekeeping script using REXX to remove Image Copies (backups) that were older than a certain date. I ran the script to test it but hadn't realised i was in the production environment. When i realised what had happended i ran round to our system guys to see if they could kill the job but unfortunately all the tape requests had been issued to the tape robot and every single image copy was deleted, leaving the system a little vunerable. It then took a further 9 hours to recover 3 image copies per database! I felt they needed to test their backups!!!
Needless to say i haven't made that mistake again, i always double check which environment i'm in before running anything.
Growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional -
Once, whilst performing some fairly straightforward permissions changes on a data warehouse server (SQL7) that also ran IIS (and the permission changes were to do with IIS), when I okayed my permission changes it seemingly removed all permissions for every account from the entire system drive.
The server virtually immediately started playing up, then blue screened. I rebooted it, but it then just started blue-screening during the boot so wouldn't start (didn't have any permissions to run!). This happened at 9PM. No-one else was around, and since it wasn't going to be accessed until the next day, I decided to sort it the next morning when the tech support team were in.
Luckily the data drive was intact, so a re-build and re-attachment of the databases fixed the problem; took a couple of hours in total.
When I told the tech support manager what happened, he wasn't at all surprised, and said something about changing permissions remotely from a Win 2K machine (which my box was) in Explorer, on a NT Server box, can cause this.
The only reason I did it that way was because I couldn't be bothered to take an extra few seconds to log on to the server via Terminal Services and do it properly...
-
i considered buying a MAC once.
-
This was in Oracle not SQL Server, but....
I was hired as an Oracle Programmer to review a vendor's work on setting up a database for us. They set up three databases as two would be production at two separate locations and the last would be a 'backup'. These were on UNIX boxes. We kept having everything lock up because space ran out. I was told to delete this one file in a specific folder. Okay, no hard work. One day I decided to look a files in that folder to see if any others were unnecessary. I right clicked on this one that was a .sh program and selected Open - or so I thought. Right under Open is RUN and this program ran. All I saw was DELETE This......DELETE that run across my screen. Then it stopped and I thought ROLLBACK. Ran that and it was successful. Big SIGH of relief. Then I ran a script and yep - everything was gone. Why didn't the rollback work? The vendor had built-in COMMITs everywhere in their script.
Bonus...the vendor as part of their contract had to show us how to recover from any of the other databases, so we got to request they do it now. They couldn't. Why didn't they 'lock' down the script so it couldn't be run by just anyone? They never thought of it. Finally, we canceled the contract...turned out they didn't have a finished product as they had told us. They were developing a product on our time and with our resources. So a bad mistake on my part ended up being a benefit to our company. WHEW!!!!
BTW-because of that my company ended up going with a product that uses Microsoft SQL Server and that's how I became a SQL Server DBA.
-SQLBill
-
I once showed a new employee how to delete all the files in a subdirectory ...
Type in ... delete c:\mydir\*.* ...
"but be careful, if you leave out the subdir, you will kill the whole drive "
"what the hell Del, do you think I'm an idiot ???" they replied ...
IT wasn't 10 minutes and guess what ...
-
A Big Mac? Yeah, you gotta be careful where the meat comes from with those burgers...
I wasn't born stupid - I had to study.
-
One day we were getting ready for a new release, and I was asked to restore a database to the staging server which is in the production domain.
Usually I take care when im anywhere near production but being busy for the release I didn't remember being particularly carefull. I restored the database and a few minutes later I had a manager come over and say to me. Can you look at production the data does not look right. My Stomach instantly felt ill, My throat closed up. OMG! Did I just restore a test database over production? The next minute of my life I thought I was gonna die. But wait.....
Every thing looks fine what the hell, I didn't do nothing wrong.
Phew Turned out I did everything right, but being in a rush caused me to do a double take.
-
Wait a minute! What is this one? "I thought I screwed up, but I was mistaken"?
I wasn't born stupid - I had to study.
-
Yes that one should not count.
-
oh, you're one to talk!! "I almost bought bad meat once..."
I wasn't born stupid - I had to study.
-
well i almost considered you very very very funny. Glad I sidestepped that mistake.
-
How about this one....a long, long time ago.
We had a data entry system, lots of people hammering away, entering data. All going into 1 file on a mainframe.
Everything worked fine, but occaisionally we had to 'reorg' the file as the inserts got slower and slower. I discovered that in the reorg JCL you could put the same file for input and output which made life a lot 'easier' for me. Just shut down the application, run the reorg, startup the application. The job ran fine the first 99 times. I'm sure you guessed by now that on the 100'th time the reorg job ran out of sort space. No output file created, therefore no input file left! No data. Lost a whole days worth of people inputting data! I had to leave by the back door for a month until the data entry people forgot.
Maybe I did them a favor, they all got overtime because they had to stay late.
-
Five years into my programming life I needed to write a printer driver for a product and decided that C was the way to go (though I'd only ever written in higher level languages).
I wrote an entire C program that compiled and worked on my dev box, but then failed when I went to run it on a production box. I was totally unaware that you had to allocate memory for string variables...
You don't need to be brand new to be a complete idiot sometimes. It did set me on a path to understanding the fundamentals though.
-
I cut my teeth learning programming during a C class. The teacher was incredible in showing fundamentals! He ended up being able to teach 3 semesters... it was the best!
(And, you don't have to be a work to be shown you made a mistake - I get that here happily on regular basis
Bulldozer Approach) Finally, another a real reply!
I wasn't born stupid - I had to study.
Viewing 15 posts - 1 through 15 (of 19 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply