We've all been there

bubblenut

After reading a post just now I thought it would be nice to have a thread showing newbs that we've all made silly mistakes at sometime or other (I consider myself somewhat of a pro. 😉) and that the important thing is to take it in your stride and not get knocked back.

I'll start the ball rolling with one which I made not too long ago. One which is all the more embarrasing because I was not an utter newb at the time :o.

The company I work for has a MySQL database which contains, among other tables, a products table. A couple of the columns in this table refference product images. I was asked one day to write a little interface which would enable people to update images on batches of products, "simple enough" I hear you say and that it is ... for anyone other than me :p. I'd left a rather damaging hole in the script which, under certain conditions, left the where condition off the query. I can just see you all rolling your eyes and sighing. Yes, you guessed it. During testing I found out this little "feature" and updated the images for every single product in the database to the same thing :eek:. What's worse, your friendly neighborhood muppet hadn't even used a valid url so they were all broken (which in hindsight was lucky as the same product image for all products would have been very confusing :p). Needless to say my boss was none too impressed and, quite rightly, directed me to this page in the mysql manual 🙁. My boss rolled back the DB and the only things that sustained personal damage were my pride and my reputation.

I'd love to hear anyone elses most embarassing c**k-ups, I'm sure we'll all learn a lot from them (and maybe have a little laugh along the way :p). A couple from some of the gurus of the board would be cool 😃

Cheers
Bubble

LordShryku

I once made the mistake of thinking bubblenut knew how to update a database. I was clearly wrong 😃

Luckily, at work, I have a very solid test enviroment in which to test all new scripts, procedures, etc, and I've had the pleasure of doing some really stupid things there, like the updating of everything to the wrong value, quickly rolled back.

It may be hard to believe, but I'm one of the few that can learn from the mistakes of others, so I don't cause many detrimental mistakes myself. I'll share one of my co-worker's with you for the sake of learning.

We have a 400+ thousand sqare foot warehouse, which we run a warehouse management system. A friend of mine, we'll call him "Mike", was working as a System Analyst at the time. I was working along side him, learning the ropes. One of our duties includes "system support", on a pretty wide scale. In this particular instance, we had a blocking lock in Oracle, which prevents users from accessing the blocked table until the lock is cleared. This is a major problem, considering a lock for five minutes could cost us a million dollars. So we take this as a very high priority, and begin grepping through message logs to find the user. Ah ha! Found them! The fix for this is to kill off the user's process, which in turn releases the lock. So Mike does the usual "ps -aef|grep user", and up comes the process. Now, anyone familiar with Unix knows there are two process id's. The one on the left is the child pid, and the one on the right is the parent pid. Well, guess which one he killed? Killing the parent pid knocked the whole system offline, turning our situation from bad to horrible. Our boss comes running to to the room "What the hell just happened!?!?", as Mike is scrambling to contact our Unix admin so he can restart the daemon. A couple minutes later, all is restored, and everyone is calm. This was two years ago, and to this day, Mike still catches hell for it.

Moral: Always the left pid. Always!!!!

😃

Weedpacket

Chance here to reprise an old thread.

And yes bubblenut, it works - yadayadayada. I can fix bugs you know.

piersk

Ahhh, I' forgotten all about that thread..

drawmack

At my last job we would program and do initial testing on our windows work stations, then we'd move it to the linux test server and make sure the os change didn't break anything before finally moving it to the live server.

Well one time I wrote it under windows, uploaded to the test and everything worked beautifully. So then I uploaded it to the live server, but I used binary instaed of ascii uploading and broke the client's entire site. That was not a fun day.

onion2k

Originally posted by drawmack
My Website

Wow.

Merve

Remember my old PEBoDMyAdmin project that I scrapped? Well, anyway, I wanted to show it to a friend, so I uploaded part of the script to my webspace. It didn't work and I got tons of MySQL error. I fiddled around for an hour trying to make it work, but then I realised that I don't have access to any databases on my webspace! What a waste of time!