Oh sh*t

Manager: "we need an SQL database"
Dev: dude does he even know what he's talking about
Dev: "so which color?"
Manager: "idk well I think a blockchain has the most RAM"

When you watch hunger games and wonder how the database works

When i open a 2 gigabyte wordlist text file and forgot that my defaults​ text editor is GUI based.

Client A: "so we using cloud-based server? is it safe? will raining cause data leak? you know rain water is from cloud? how you guys manage to control it???"

Me: "??????"

Hey everyone,

This coming Sunday (Feb 4), at about 12AM EST, devRant will be going down for scheduled maintenance (database server maintenance). The maintenance shouldn’t take more than about 15 minutes.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions and apologies for the inconvenience!

looks like slutty sally has had a crappy backend dev...

I always like to approach a new coding project by concentrating on the data model first. I've seen a lot of projects built on extremely convoluted database structures and it really hurts because it makes it hard to add new features to the project.

So I look at the requirements of the new project and try to come up with a basic data model. Then I like to think about what logical future additions to the project could be. And using those, I try to see if the data model is flexible enough to be able to handle those additions fairly easily or if complex migrations or hacks would be needed to account for new use cases and features.

I think once you have a solid data structure and database technology, planning out an API or rest of the software is pretty straight forward. I like to create reusable pieces of middleware early on in the project which makes it easy to apply consistent functionality with ease to different API endpoints.

I love starting my day by finding things like this in a production environment...

Hey everyone - tonight we performed a database upgrade and unfortunately there were a few "surprise" breaking changes to the query language we use that weren't caught during testing. Once they were discovered after the upgrade. The queries were corrected within a few minutes. You might have noticed some issues with commenting, voting, etc.

On this note, please let me know if you notice anything suspicious like errors when trying to perform normal actions, or anything at all. I appreciate any reports since it's a bit tricky for us to cover every last part of the app alone, though I think we went through most of it. Thanks and please let me know if you have any questions!

Friend: Dude, css is so cool and amazing. I love it

Me: Erm ye, okay...

Friend: I think, im gonna make a css program to save data to database. That would make it even cooler!

Me: ye, okay. Wait what?! Hahahahaha

Friend: ??? Why u laughing

Please be gentle, first rant here.

I'm a hobby .NET Developer, so nothing serious, but when a "close" friend asked me if i could help him, i saw my opportunity to show my skills.
Said "close" friend is working for a non profit agency and deals with a lot of people, so he asked for a database with some extras. The task was fairly easy and i needed 2 weeks (besides my real Job), to get what he wants.
The big day comes and I show him my work. He was very pleased with it, and also I did it for free, he paid me actually really good money for it. I designed that DB as idiot proof as possible, but i should have known better.
2 month went by without a single crash or any other Problems, but yesterday i received a call..
Him: Your Update broke everything!! fix it asap!!
Me: What happend, I did not push an update for 2 month.
Him: You A**hole, its all your fault!!

After like 5 mins of swearing, I agreed to come over and have a look.
Oh boii, you would'nt believe how stupid some people can be..
Let me tell you, he got 2 files "ProgrammName.exe" and "ProgrammName_Database" and this idiot of a Person thought "hmm my PC ist getting kinda slow, let me delete some junk, so he goes ahead and deletes the whole Database and calls me stupid names, because he lost all his data, and no, MR.I GOT 20 TOOL-BARS INSTALLED AND I DELETE SOME JUNK ASS FILES, I DONT HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR STUFF!!

So now you know why i called him "close" friend..

Story time:

I was once working on a project that dealt with incredibly sensitive financial data.

We needed a client’s database to do a migration.

They wouldn’t send it over the internet because it was too big and they didn’t think it would be secure.

They opt to send it in the post on an encrypted usb drive.

(Fair enough thinks I)

USB drive arrives.
Is indeed encrypted.

MFW there’s a post it note in the envelope with the password on.

MFW this is a billion dollar multinational petrochem company.

MFW this same company’s ‘sysadmin’ and ‘dba’ once complained because a SQL script I sent them didn’t work - they’d pasted it twice and couldn’t work this out from the fucking “table already created” error message management studio was throwing at them.

When your client takes titles pretty seriously

I.T company...

Only Developers will understand this!!

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2 guys enter a NoSQL bar, then quickly left because they couldn't find a table.

Had a database engineer tell me that he put a minimal delay of 15 seconds on every query, so that people don't come complaining to him that the database takes longer than usual

😂😂😂😂

The ER diagram of the system we are working with. I'm not kidding

Found this some time ago in an open source project.

i rest my case....ask no more..#programmer

You know your week starts great, when you receive a call, that the whole shop database of a company is not working anymore.
Turns out MS Fucking SQL decided to drop all tables, just because the harddisk was full.

A SERIOUS FUCK YOU TO MICROSCHROTT!

It's not a lot of fun, when 15 people have to wait for you about 1 hour, until it is restored.

Why does this have to happen on a monday?

Went with a cousin to hospital for vaccination .I took a pen and wrote: "Anti-Virus database updated 09.01.2017" . Now I am not allowed to stay with my cousin :(

"It's just going to be a small application". Six months into development, here we are:

NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER trust a backup that wasn't made by you!!!

F*ck!

Background: I leave my job last year, so my "boss" replace me with a junior support guy instead of a sys admin.

Few months later a client contract me directly because the support guy almost destroyed the server.

The server remain failing, so we buy a new server. Today the old server does not boot anymore. So we was importing the data base backup to the new server and the backup doesn't work!

The client lost almost a month of data! Now I'm the bad guy who doesn't backup properly.

F*ck!

How do people just go about deleting databases when they don't mean to?

"Ah, a database!"
*Flaps hands at the keyboard until something happens*
"Oops, I deleted the database :/"
(*Posts a rant about accidentally deleting the database on devRant*)

🤔

Reason why I am single:

How do I query the database?

Best explanation of difference between joins

2486 tables! F**king "entrprise" BS

Bad things should happen to people who put spaces in table names and fields.

Credit to /r/programming

We've built a web app and now a client wants a VPN acces to the database of web app. When asked why, they said they want to occasionally pull some data out. 😱

We said no, and this is what they wrote:
"We’ve got live VPN access to every other web database we work with – why is this different?"

Well because maybe we know that we can build you an export of whatever you want, prepare you API calls for getting data to your CRM, but hell I'm not giving you access to the production DB.

Worst part of being a database dev:

It is arguably the least sexist dev job out there.

Don't think anyone is going to be interested in how you 'reduced the runtime of a query from 30 minutes to 5 minutes for a front-end app used by an important client' or 'used the data dictionary to better handle resource management for important transactions.'

Select * from World where "someone" like '%you%';

No result!

Damn...

DB UPGRADE COMPLETE.

All databases are document databases if your varchars are big enough.

Learning database at university, they teaching us about protection.
Tried DROP TABLE *...
Guess what happend...
In meanwhile Iam guessing what is going happen to me

The reason why I changed my username ( I'll just be honest here )

I was working on a website. I noticed that entries were submitting yesterday but today new entries were not showing up on database. It was like my database refused to insert new rows but there was no new error in log. I kept trying for almost half an hour, read all the answers on stackoverflow, read docs, tried different methods. Nothing worked. I was fucked up. Completely fucked up.

In frustration, I just stared my database for 10 mins without a single blink, and then I noticed this thing 'showing 25 out of 78 rows'
(-_-)
I clicked on 'show all'

AAAAAAND

I felt retarded.

Okay I can give an excuse that last time I saw a database was a year ago, but still.. how retarded you need to be to not see this FUCKIN 'SHOW ALL' when it is on the TOP of the FUCKIN TABLE!!

"So, what do you do in life?"

Me : I work on enterprise level mobile, web and server applications. Basically programming and database stuff...

"Sweet! So you can fix my PC right? It's getting slow I don't know why..."

Me : mmm well, ugh... yea kinda, I guess... sure. I could take a look 😑

So I am running this crypto project that has dynamically generated private keys for a wallet stored in a Redis database. Nowhere else. The keys are generated on the fly.

At the moment of the happening the wallet had over 3.000 USD on it. I am testing new code locally, supposedly on a local Redis DB. Of a sudden, my code wipes the crypto keys and it turns out that I was connected to the live instance. 😱 Better don't ask me how.

Shock of my life. You know, when you turn pale and dark in your eyes, blood stops in your veins and you just want to die? Worst-case scenario that could have happened. All that money lost in crypto space.

Turns out, my good Redis hosting company kept backups for the past 7 days. Keys restored. Happiest moment of my life.

If I could!

Arrived today, hyped!

I have real-world experience with MongoDB, MySQL, Firebase, and caching with Redis.

A colleague in ops recommended this book a while back and I thought I'd give it a whirl to better understand what other options I have available.

Actual quote of our database professor in third semester: "Databases are a lot like sausage making. Once you know how it's made you don't want it anymore".

"please use a secure password*"

* But don't make it too secure, 20 Charakters is enough.

Why would you fucking do this? The only reason I can think about is a scenario like this:
"How do we store the passwords in the database?"
"Just like anything else?"
"So I create a VARCHAR(20)?"
"Yeah why not? It's good enough for a name, and you shouldn't use your or anyone else's name as a password, so it should be perfect"

Stolened! 😆😆

So I was tasked setting up our new project. They spent $299 on a JavaScript photo book editor application for the frontend. It comes with an example PHP backend and database schema...
Which grabs the entire book's content directly from the DOM and vomits the HTML into a TEXT column.
These guys are successfully selling XSS to developers...

Teacher: From today on, we will start working with ms access 😊.
Me: Please die and let my life in peace ☹️ and learn with something useful (MySQL) instead.

Q: Why did the database administrator leave his wife?

A: She had one-to-many relationships.

Database with hashed content looks crazy ;D

Its such a elating feeling when you implement multithreading perfectly.

I had a task where I read data from one table, searched on it and added the searched data to another table. The table had 0.22 million records.

On single thread it took entire night to do half of the job.

I divided it into 8 thread jobs, and pushed my quadcore to 100% and voila, its done in 2.5Hrs.

Just like Hannibal would have said, "I love it when a plan comes together"

Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.

The fuck I'm dealing with!

Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.

There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.

There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.

Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.

Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).

ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'

And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.

And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.

Today, social media databases around the world will be forced to accept billions of shitty firework photos.

I'm moving some old data into a new database.

It contains some dates that *should* be in ISO 8601...

This is some of the trash that I found:
01/01/70
2010-11-05T08:06:48T08:06:03.7
2007-09-13T

Moreover, it has a column which *should* contains numbers, instead it has been defined using varchar, so it contains also some wonderful 'NaN' values.

I really would like to beat the person who set up all this stuff without some basic validation policies.

Delete without where clause...

Database admins out there?

Rant, but also want to know, how the fuck do you accidentally drop a database link. In production. On the most important database. Housing our biggest applications.

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me that another colleague has done this in his web application for a subject:

For checking user and password, he did not query a database, but instead he checked information in a HIDDEN DIV in the html page.

Reason: "this way I don't lose my precious time".

I think of that and I'd like to punch him. People like him are the reason websites in Italy suck and my University web infrastructure sucks (he worked as intern on that).

My. God.

before vs now

just another day at office
just another code review

I seriously feel like this should be a joke/meme.
What you see in the picture is a database table.
This guy's now running around with a degree in something related to web development.

I develop health insurance software. Today my world got a lot scarier.

Ok so this happend in the last 3 days, I didn't post it till now because I had to seriously take a rest with all the bullshit and stress that came with it...
(Legacy project I have the lead in called: "Foo")

Monday:
Management decided it would be effective to add a senior and a junior to Foo, which would make (together with me) to be 2 juniors and one senior developer
Well I've spend most of that day helping both the junior and the senior to setup "Foo" on their local development machines... So I could not do any programming myself

tuesday:
The senior wanted to refactor EVERYTHING... and I had to stop him multiple times because we simply do not have the time to do that...
The junior tried to work on other things as much as he could, and after he had run out of things to do, asked me for EVERYTHING... EVEN WHERE TO FUCKING CHANGE SOME GOD DAMN STRINGS!....
Also he did in total 3 commits, two of which existed of my code (because I had to "help" him

wednesday:
Both the junior and senior were removed from the project and I got another senior.. who fucking deleted the production database on accident

god damn rough few days man...

When people say SQL, when they really mean MS SQL Server.

I think every programmer goes through this time every day....

#Don't wait for inspiration, become it. #balls

I love this database primarily because it is cross platform and can be easily understood by anyone unlike SQL database files.

So, apparently the legacy code I'm told to maintain at work requires me to add a windows user via control panel to my PC for SQL database to work.

Achievment unlocked : first time database delete clause where fuckup on a live database.

This just happened at work, except for the fact the entire database was dropped...

Reality 😂😂

I woke up early and thaught I could finish some database work today.
Beeing tipsy I deleted two production tables and shit my pants.

Luckily I do backups since the last retarded db-deletion.

...and I just deleted 2 tables of client data 😮😭😭😭 😑

Found this hat at Goodwill.

Why do I have no problems writing code and designing databases, but draw a complete blank when trying to come up with a good database username for the code to use?

After a week of trying to figure out why my Android Studio project wasn't connecting to my db I finally realized that I was using the wrong URL

Oh boy. Gotta love having a team member (For a School project) be in charge of the Database functionality/design, who has almost no communication skills and basically no clue about how to store data in a data base.
Im talking dates stored as varchar(5), column sizes being way way to small, overall table design being rather terrible, no primary/foreign keys, pretty much... Actually no, everything was being stored as a varchar.
Not only that, but there was a hell lot of data that needed to be stored that wasn't even accounted for in the DB design. He made some code that could be used by our team members for queries, creating tables, inserting data (etc), almost 2,000 lines of it.... And basically nothing was fucking documented at all. I'm talking comments like "Insert data into cities table" and nothing else. More complicated functions had as much, or less documentation. Complete mess.

I recently got a Sysadmin/Devops job at an Uber-like local startup.
After a few days in and with a 20% increase in daily API calls, we started getting "502 gateway error" for like half of the requests which was insane!
I double checked nginx, php-fpm, mysql, etc and in the end turns out that they log every app login session in a 680K row table in a mysql database and run a query every time to find out if the client was logged in or not!

°__°

One of our backend devs just changed an existing migration instead of creating a new one.
Thanks a lot mate.

Oh man.
I imagine the face of the guy who deleted Gitlab production database when he realized what he had done.

I just saw the code of a guy who queries the database in the class construct *facepalm*

OMFG I don't even know where to start..
Probably should start with last week (as this is the first time I had to deal with this problem directly)..

Also please note that all packages, procedure/function names, tables etc have fictional names, so every similarity between this story and reality is just a coincidence!!

Here it goes..

Lat week we implemented a new feature for the customer on production, everything was working fine.. After a day or two, the customer notices the audit logs are not complete aka missing user_id or have the wrong user_id inserted.
Hm.. ok.. I check logs (disk + database).. WTF, parameters are being sent in as they should, meaning they are there, so no idea what is with the missing ids.

OK, logs look fine, but I notice user_id have some weird values (I already memorized most frequent users and their ids). So I go check what is happening in the code, as the procedures/functions are called ok.

Wow, boy was I surprised.. many many times..
In the code, we actually check for user in this apps db or in case of using SSO (which we were) in the main db schema..
The user gets returned & logged ok, but that is it. Used only for authentication. When sending stuff to the db to log, old user Id is used, meaning that ofc userid was missing or wrong.

Anyhow, I fix that crap, take care of some other audit logs, so that proper user id was sent in. Test locally, cool. Works. Update customer's test servers. Works. Cool..

I still notice something off.. even though I fixed the audit_dbtable_2, audit_dbtable_1 still doesn't show proper user ids.. This was last week. I left it as is, as I had more urgent tasks waiting for me..

Anyhow, now it came the time for this fuckup to be fixed. Ok, I think to myself I can do this with a bit more hacking, but it leaves the original database and all other apps as is, so they won't break.
I crate another pck for api alone copy the calls, add user_id as param and from that on, I call other standard functions like usual, just leave out the user_id I am now explicitly sending with every call.
Ok this might work.

I prepare package, add user_id param to the calls.. great, time to test this code and my knowledge..

I made changes for api to incude the current user id (+ log it in the disk logs + audit_dbtable_1), test it, and check db..
Disk logs fine, debugging fine (user_id has proper value) but audit_dbtable_1 still userid = 0.

WTF?! I go check the code, where I forgot to include user id.. noup, it's all there. OK, I go check the logging, maybe I fucked up some parameters on db level. Nope, user is there in the friggin description ON THE SAME FUCKING TABLE!!
Just not in the column user_id...

WTF..Ok, cig break to let me think..

I come back and check the original auditing procedure on the db.. It is usually used/called with null as the user id. OK, I have replaced those with actual user ids I sent in the procedures/functions. Recheck every call!! TWICE!! Great.. no fuckups. Let's test it again!
OFC nothing changes, value in the db is still 0. WTF?! HOW!?

So I open the auditing pck, to look the insides of that bloody procedure.. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!
Instead of logging the p_user_sth_sth that is sent to that procedure, it just inserts the variable declared in the main package..
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?! Did the 'new guy' made changes to this because he couldn't figure out what is wrong?! Nope, not him. I asked the CEO if he knows anything.. Noup.. I checked all customers dbs (different customers).. ALL HAD THIS HARDOCED IN!!! FORM THE FREAKING YEAR 2016!!! O.o

Unfuckin believable.. How did this ever work?!

Looks like at the begining, someone tried to implement this, but gave up mid implementation.. Decided it is enough to log current user id into BLABLA variable on some pck..
Which might have been ok 10+ years ago, but not today, not when you use connection pooling.. FFS!!

So yeah, I found easter eggs from years ago.. Almost went crazy when trying to figure out where I fucked this up. It was such a plan, simple, straight-forward solution to auditing..

If only the original procedure was working as it should.. bloddy hell!!

Manager: let's use elasticsearch for performing relational queries. PostgreSQL performance is not great.

Me: Say what? 👿

Completely got my localhost and live database confused and dropped the whole live server. And there was a power outage so the last backup is from Friday. Luckily not completely live, but still having a stream of people walking in. Also pretty obvious that they are talking about me especially since there's no other shes in the department.

Just came across this very user friendly error

Top 10 database engines on db-engine... I never knew the top 3 were so far ahead of the game, if that site is anything to go by.

God bless indexing.
Went from 5sec for 10 records to an instant for 300.

Joins, explained perfectly

The worst mistake I made was using json files as a simple database.

The project was to be delivered the day before it was even ordered, so I had to take shortcuts.

I totally underestimated the popularity of the project, so all that file reading and writing made the server slow and sluggish. It also being submitted on a shared host, made it even worse.

In the end the host shut it down. I don't recall, but I guess I had to add that database support after all, the project being that popular...

I'm migrating data from an old software to a new one I wrote.

Old database it's in Access (yeah, fuck). When I opened one table, the VM hung up and I opened the task manager on MADE

What.The.Fuck.Are.You.Doing?

Me: deployment exploded, the database has to be restored.
C: yeah, the latest backup we have is is from Q1 2016
Me: wat? We have almost weekly changes of the database layout, let alone the content.
C: yeah, you have to execute somewhat 60 sql files ... Have fun
* Sitting in a corner and staring apathecally at the wall*

Brain storming with senior lead developer. We try to add new tables in our database. But the Google spreadsheet goes wrong

Hey, DBA guy! Security blocked this one port for the database. Can you change the database to a different port?
Me: No, I actually like working here.

Today in development: discovered that it's possible via combination of keys to rename a database in SQL Server Management Studio without as much as a dialog box to confirm.

Shout out to the 2000ish users in production that discovered this delightful nugget of info with me.

Lessons learned:

A) Don't trust Microsoft to create software that makes you confirm potentially catastrophic actions

B) Make sure your user hasn't been granted ALTER DATABASE permissions without your knowledge before you start using it.

I JUST HAD ONE OF THOSE DAYS THAT MAKES ONE WANT TO BANG TWO BRICKS ON HEAD SND END THE PAIN THE STORY STARTS YESTETDAY WITH ISSUES AFTER A MIGRSTION AND THEY ASK ME TO HELP TROUBLESHOOT EVEN THOUGH I'M A DEV DBA AND THE ISSUE IS IN QA/SAT AND I HELP ANYWAY AND THEY CAN'T FIND A VIEW AND SO I LOOK EVERYWHERE AND CAN'T DOING IT EITHER AND IT DIDN'T EXIST IN PROD OR DEV SO I TELL THEM IT'S NOT THERE, AND THEY ARE LIKE, CAN YOU RETRIEVE IT FOR US AND I'M LIKE FROM WHERE? I DON'T KEEP VIEWS IN MY BUTT AND YOU GUYS ARE SMOKING CRACK AND THE GIVE ME THEIR QUERY WHICH CONTAIN THE VIEE ANYWAY AND THEY SAY CAN YOU RUN IT AND IT RUNS AND WORKS AND THEY CAN'T MAKE IT WORK AND IT WORKS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T CALL THE VIEW THEY HAVE ME SO NO PROBLEM THERE SO I FINALLY ASK THEM ARE YOU POINTING TO THE CORRECT DATABASE AND THEY'RE LIKE OH MAN WE TOLD YOU THE WRONG DATABASE AND SO I LOOK AT THE RIGHT DATABASE AND FIND THAT THE GRANTS ARE MISSING AND YEAH THANK YOU FOR TAKING EIGHT HOURS OF MY LIFE BECAUSE WE WERE IN THE WRONG DB YOU GAVE ME AND I HOPE THE FLAG OF A THOUSAND CAMELS INVEST YOUR ARMPITS AND THE CHIGGERS OF A THOUSAND SOUTHERN LAWNS INGEST YOUR SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR. YAAAAAA!!!!

From Gitlab: "So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place."

Dev nightmares :

- Not finding bug fix on stackoverflow/GitHub .

- Losing code that hasn't been pushed to GitHub.

- Dealing with an unclean and inconsistent database.

- Installing Node Dependencies.

- Resolving CORS and 500s.

- Training a Linear Regression Model with 700 epochs on an entry-level Laptop.

Keep appending to this list.

#devrant #devnightmares

JSON: "Ok fine you can use our syntax and everything else but make sure you change the name of the format so people know there is a difference"

MongoDB : "K"

From the web!

You never know which deleted table come back to haunt you.

DROP TABLE

An Oracle Database running on a Windows Server, communicating with an MS SQL Server over SOAP...

Me: "can you please send my credentials for the database?"

Hosting provider: "Yea sure... We will set it up on our servers in no time"

*5 mins later: provider sends mail to me*

Me: *looks at mail*

Also me: *NOTHING TO DO HERE*

Congrats to jweiland.net for not being able to support their customers.

I'm curious..

When does programming suck for you, and when is it fun?

Like I hate programming, when I run into an obscure use case that opens up some serious errors with my some, or gasp, all, of my architecture and forces me to rethink everything - especially DB design, ugh.

I love programming when my architecture and DB design create naturally readable code and everything falls into place and I feel like a genius.

I guess, in short.... plan before you code?

And then, plan again.

But don't plan too much.

The love/hate of my programming life summed up right there I think.

How about you?

Secure database configuration

I was out sick the day an urgent ETL job I was building would be due, so it got reassigned. When I return, I find most of my code commented out and replaced.

The first step was rewritten, with a comment that reads "Made changes to run faster." What used to be a single execution lasting 30 seconds was now a 4 step process taking 5 minutes, and yielding identical results.

Being a one-time execution (not a recurring job), I'm left wondering why they thought execution speed was even an issue, let alone what about their redesign they felt was an improvement...

It's faster to design a database, import data from Excel, and run queries than having to deal with these formula shit

I am a mechanical engineer first and my companies go to sysadmin second. So software developing isnt really my main field of expertise buuttt:

WHY IS SLOOPY SOFTWARE WRITING A VIABLE EXCUSE?

Story:
Yesterday i started to migrate some stuff from our old Win 2008 Server to the new 2016. Turns out there are some MS SQL Express Servers running. Quick check for what they are turns out that they are activly used. So far so good. For other reasons we have a new MSSQL 2017 Core Licence. So i thought, hey it would be nice to just move those 2012, 2008 and 2014 Express Servers to a real one that can use the entire machines capabilities.
After some try & error with exporting one of the softwares (where i had to elevate one the user rights to sysadmin for reasons) the entire system stopped working. I didnt deleted anything or changed anything! Well, i elevated user rights. After 2 hours of support call it turns out that the software stopped working cause i gave the database user sysadmin rights. I dont know enough about MSSQL to judge wether that is logical or not, but it sounds super illogical and i suspect sloopy software writing on the manufacturers part. One way or another, the excuse from the telephone support was "yeah, our software is a very fragile child"
Okay.
After i told all that my coworkers two of them were also "yeah, that is just how the [company] software is, you have to be careful with it"

Apparently it broke in the past for other minor stuff.
As an engineer i cannot build bridges that collapse when you use the left and the right lane at the same time. For an architect it isnt okay to build an house where the front door explodes when you open a window. It is not okay for a power tool to go out in a fireball when you accidently drill plastic with it. But for some weird reasons its socially acceptable for programs to be sloopy, buggy and only working under specific conditions. Since when is it okay for a car only to work when you know specific steps to make it run? Like, throwing your spare key in the gas tank, the kick the left wheel exactly three times and finally tapping the steering wheel 5 times left, 4 times right. What? That would be ridiculous? But that is exactly how that software works. You have to follow a specific step guide to make it work, EVERY TIME.

I. JUST. DONT. GET. IT

I had to write a script to clean some crap from a database.
In particular it had some records containing multiple names and I had to split them.
It was really a nightmare because the separator was not always the same, e.g. "John, Mark and Bob" or "Alice+Mary".
«Ok, let's use a fucking regex: ",|(and)|\\+|/|&"»
Then, I realized there were some "Alessandro" in the database. Yeah, Aless(and)ro. Shit.
So I had eventually added more crap into the database.

Hey girl are you a NoSQL database? Because I can’t fucking understand you. 😑😑

Building an interface for a client between industrial power quality meters and a database that serves a webapp of data.

Client had heard of a way of sending data between meter and raspberry. From some manager in a big firm.

Currently we where using modus to connect the meter to a raspberry. This method was tested and proofen to work. Both devices could talk to each other in modbus.

Client kept demaning to use mbus, and was nog listening to any reason because the firm suggested it. In the end we end up going modbus to mbus to send it to the raspberry. There the mbus was converted back modbus. Because the meter could not communicate in mbus.

Really weird experience to program something so useless. But protesting about it was going nowhere and taking more time than the changes would take to implant.

PM asked me to develop an application to fetch data from the customer's DB, which would require an access security token provided by the customer. To get the token, I would have to travel to Germany (I live in Portugal) to get it personally (it's not possible to have someone else pick it up for me).

It turns out the security token is a completely closed environment, with its own OS, without the possibility of installing any application or communicating with the exterior. The laptop itself would boot from the token's OS.

It was concluded I would have to hack the security token, which is completely non compliant. So the PM decided not to go forward with it.

But now, I have to go Germany anyway to pick up the security tokens because they forgot to order them for these other guys who would be using them to access the customer's DB manually and they don't want to delay the project anymore.

Oh, and the security tokens cost the project 500€/month each...

"<service> isn't autoscaling it's dbs correctly"

Autoscaling.... Database... *cries*

Me: *asks for sample data for all tables to test database transactions*

Team member: *gives over 45000 records only for city*

🤔 😐

One of the devs at my internship company decided to have a client's website load all of it's pages from the website's Database.
That's right, a PAGE as a database row!
And I don't mean having it get some of the info from the columns and putting it into the page's html with php or some shit. No, I mean an actual html file copy pasted and added into the database.
This company scares me sometimes.

It should not be this difficult to get a database dump.

Me
Can you please send over the schema and data for database X? I want to script together something to import the dump into my local DB and look at the entity relationships. (This is important for later. Stupidly, I thought it would be simple enough to open up SQL Server Management Studio, select all the boxes, and hit Go. How wrong I was.)

Vendor
*Sends CSV files of the data*

Me
Can you please provide a database dump in SQL format? It would make it much easier for me to import.

Vendor
*Sends SQL file to create table structure*
*Sends zip containing CSV files of data*
*Pause*
*Sends single CSV file, forgot one oopsie*

Me, frustration building
I'm looking for a .sql that contains schema and data. Can you provide this?

Vendor
Idk, I've never done this before, let me try

YOU'RE A FUCKING DB ADMIN, HOW HAVE YOU NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE

Vendor one week later:
Here it is *attaches private Google Drive link I don't have access to*

Me losing hope:
*requests access using personal email*
*downloads*
*imports, naively thinking my ordeal is over*

No foreign keys. I feel as though this should be implied by the term "schema dump" and the phrase "I want to look at the entity relationships". I swear to God, db admins are either totally incompetent or SQL geniuses, there is no middle ground.

Working in my local development database.

UPDATE myTable SET setColumn = NULL;

WARNING: Unsafe Query.

UPDATE myTable SET setColumn = NULL WHERE 1 = 1;

300 Rows affected.

Boss at the start of a new project: "We could hire an intern to gatter some data in an excel list... You can easily implement that in the application later - right? So can you get us a excel list to fill out? "

No... Just no...

You tell me what you wanna see and how you wanna interact with the application!

In the process we will figure out which data is necessary, I will build some tables in the database for that data and then, !!! not a second sooner !!! , I'll be able to give you an suitable excel list, which includes a complete list of columns for the necessary data in a form I can work with it.

It's not my job to know what data a application needs to make YOUR JOB easier! I'm not a magician! I just love programming stuff!

Database is being slow AF again. Team lead is investigating. This is happening more often lately and affects both production and dev because everything is just in one gigantic database. So clients are calling support being angry about the speed they get and us devs get to twiddle our thumbs while waiting for our own data to load.

Perform code review and see stuff like this...
var count = dbContext.Posts.ToList().Count();

Selecting millions of rows from database just to get a count...

Just saw this on a website

YES!

Finished a complete version upgrade with vastly improved scalability and maintenance in just 3 weeks!

NO!

I forgot to do the database migrations as I went along. Ok... no problem.. I'll just use some kind of database comparing software, I'm sure they exist...

<googles...>

...fuck... is there not any for free?

Ok fine whatever i'll manually compare the tables and columns, fuck it. Sure there's like 50 tables and like 20 columns per... whatever...
should take like a day or so, with testing...

YES!

Finished my new version upgrade after just 6 weeks of coding!

....fuck sakes...

I am now a certified "Microsoft Technology Associate for Database Fundamentals". 😁🎉 Had to do this certification for my "Berufsausbildung".

We were discussing if table names should be singular or plural.
As a good developer, I had to check stackoverflow.
#savetheS is a movement now

Imagine accidentally deleting the entire production database today and people thought you were joking.

Why would anyone use -1 for true and 0 for false in a database.

Booleans people!!! FFS

Making migration of old project a real PITA

Not sure about friends memory... But I'll be alive in Google's Database

At last the moment of UPDATE with no WHERE came for me

Did you hear about the followup to the database movie? It's a really great SQL

Me, doing a large update on a table without backup and dry run.

Bad: Delete your production database
Good: Have a backup
Bad: Can't reimport it because your backup procedure uses scheme that are no longer supported for import by your cloud provider
Good: Backup are plaintext and somehow easy to parse
Bad: Spending the rest of the day writing scripts to reinsert everything.

End of the story: everything is up and running, 8hours of efforts

Sometimes, during bug chasing, I think about how great investigators we developers would be. Crimes resolved in hot-fix time? No problem!

Seriously, I feel like Sherlock while investigate a bug that's about what's in the databases and how it changed by which user.

When it's 1AM and you decide to try and write a database from scratch....

Project requirements include a database. I don't have permissions to create a new database on the server, so I go to the person that spins up new servers and deals with group policy. They rustle some papers around, looking aggravated, throws up hands and says, "I guess I'm the DBA now..." Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do shithead? Ask the web team to do it? We don't have a DBA. My boss has been gone all week and, really, this isn't a hard task. You check a fucking box.

Whatever, I'll remember this when they need a favor from me.

I've never really had a project "blow up", however one that I'm quite proud of is fairly popular (almost 500 monthly downloads if NPM's (limited) stats are to be believed.

It's a connector for Redis for Node, which uses ES6 Proxys in order to make basic interactions with objects in the db easier.

It's actually based off of an existing project that does the same sort of thing, but I noticed a couple of things that it did that I found a bit annoying.

1. When creating new nested objects, it didnt create a tree, meaning you had to do that manually.
2. It stored everything in a single hash, which does makes it easier to interface with, but it's a bit weird for people who didn't expect it to work that way.
3. It supports array methods with getting objects, but they don't mutate the array in the database, which was one of the main reasons I decided to make my own thing.

It took a while to get it working properly, mostly due to getting some weird ass errors, but in the end I finally got it working as I wanted.

I never really expected a lot of attention for it, but it makes itnjust that little bit sweeter to know that other people use it. And even if no one else uses it, it makes life just a bit easier for myself.

Comsci teacher just ran "php artisan migrate:fresh" on the production database

At the product backlog refinement the product owner told us (the devs) how the database model must be designed! He said he knows it best, because he knows all the requirements. 🙈

Do you know how MySQL got it's name? Well, it's a really interesting thing one should know. Atleast, I find it really amusing.

~Michael "Monty" Widenius is one of the founder of MySQL and one of his daughter's name is My(after whom MySQL was named).~

I’m stressing out man. I can look at let’s just say a sorting algorithm for now. I can look at that insertion sort and I can understand what’s happening, but if you were to tell me I was supposed to be able to write that just based off a description I couldn’t. I need to be able to design and understand algorithms but I don’t know where or how to start. There was some course I was gonna try and see what that does. I put aside JS completely to focus on C# but I’m just stressing out over here. I learned the basics of C# although I feel like I’m learning it wrong but I’m moving on to SQLite and it’s my first Database experience and it’s confusing me and I also don’t know how I’m going to be able to use it for my future applications yet I’m just expecting too much out of me idk I love programming but sometimes it’s a cruel mistress

So, I feel a sleep at my desk for about 15 minutes. Only to awaken with drool down my shirt. I then proceeded, while half sleep, to delete 58 rows from the DB...O.o

Hahahahaha good thing it was only on my machine.

3 Database SQL walked into a NOSQL bar.
A little while later, they walked out...
Because they couldn't find a table.

Working at a local seo sweat-shop as "whatever the lead dev does't feel like doing" guy.

Inherit their linux "server".
- Over 500 security updates
- Everything in /var/www is chmod to 777
- Everything in /var/www is owned by a random user that isn't apache
- Every single database is owned by root sql user
- Password for sudo user and mysql root user same as wifi password given to everyone at company.
- Custom spaghetti code dashboard with over 400 files in one directory, db/ api logins spread throughout these files, passwords in plain text.
- Dashboard doesn't have passwords, just usernames to login
- Dashboard database has all customer information including credit card stored in plain text
- Company wifi is shared by other businesses in the area

I suggest that I should try to fix some of these things.

Lead Developer / Tech Director : We're an SEO company, not a security company . . .

$rant = false;
Let say you guys are working in a team of 3 and need to share a database. All of you are in different locations.

I am currently hosting my database on online server, which is kind of slow for me because I have poor Internet in my country. How do you guys do it?

5 hours to restore a database.
1 second to realize that he fails miserably.
I hate my life.

Today I was forced to write spaghetti code.

When your database structure isn't set up properly, that happens...

I'm already sure I will need to revisit this piece of literal shit when we revise that structure. Though, it'll be much easier and logical, and I'll probably be able to just delete a big part of the code and implement it as intended.

PostgreSQL or MySQL ?
And why?

I just tried to updated mySQL on my development server, the mysql.user table is corrupted, all passwords got expired and i cant set new passwords because as i said, the user table is corrupted.

On this episode of “My Work Life” we will once again find that the code is fine, the DBAs just did something brainless again.

I was asked to update the whole confidential, financial database by exporting it as excel, and using Macros to edit its content. Much akin to adding one extra attribute per row.

The truth is, the table originally had 6.3k records. After updating and putting the data back to NoSQL database again, I realized I ended up creating 7k rows of data. Yet it works just perfect !

*HAILS TO ALMIGHTY FOR THE MIRACLE*

Sometimes, I still wonder where did those effin 700 rows come from, even after I skipped an excel while uploading

Fridays..
I was sitting in Office, reading some documentation today before I can leave for Weekend. Suddenly my co-worker next to my shouts fuck.
He is one of our database engineers and he got notified that one of the prod db Servers was on 100% and the storage was on 95% out of nowhere. So he checked that and someone else started a comparison between two large datasets.
Line by line.
Logging every cell result in a log file.
That resultet in a insanely fast growing lock file in the size of a few hundred Gigabytes.
So he looked up who did that stuff and tried to call him but it seems like the other dev leaved Right after starting his crappy script.
So he had to get his private number to call him so they could kill that script without Breaking the prod db…

I can't convince my team that a good database model promotes a good API design and a good UI/UX experience.

Instead, I have to work with a ridiculous table setup.

Imagine, if you will, a table (table B) that references another table (table A) via a foreign key. The FK is a string in both tables. And table A only has one column, which is labeled as "name".

The schema i have to look at it kind of like this:

Table parent
Name varchar(10) primary key

Table child
Name varchar (10),
parent_name varchar(10),
Foreign key (parent_name) references parent (name)

Sorry if the syntax is wrong, a little frustrated having to look at it...

Am I crazy to want to change this table design? Am I missing something? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because this is just scratching the surface of the problems I have to deal with.

A relational database goes to a noSql bar, after a while it goes out, because couldn't find a table

Arrg, need to also make a database for an application, because client doesn't want to give access to their own db. fookin Brian

When I think my teachers can get any worse after sending me snippets of several Java classes in a single txt, one of them sent me SQL code of a full database dump in a Word document. 8 pages of SQL in its full glory!

I guess using the proper file extension/format or a service like PasteBin or GitHub Gist is way too advanced for them.

is there a opensource tool to collect all the existing databases in a big company to one platform/cockpit? In order to make them queryble via graphQL? aka. [Company.api]

What happens when you give a database design to your boss as per what he wants done, he sees it is not impressed, scolds you, curses you out and claims you are 'fraud'. Then you tell him you can do better to redeem yourself...you submit the work better than the first time

And then he terminates you due to 'lack of proficiency'.

Here is a fun little challenge for you all, what does this do?

I want to cry... Fuck it.. shiit. .. :( :( ;(

Wasted half of the Weekend to Setup MySQL on my vServer which uses ssl encryption, have specific User and so on.
Thought: well, the User mysql is not so good as a Name. Drop it, you don't need it.
What did I? Instead of Drop User mysql , I typed Drop Database mysql.

Fuck that fucking Shit. I'm so sad right now. Broked the complete MySQL Database. Nothing is working anymore. And the server is new, I've Just made One Backup. Deleted this a few hours ago.. also accidently.

Help me :( Shit :( so sad :( Now, I don't have Motivation anymore to work with the vServer :(

Error reporting was flooded with failed database connection connections with me being baffled what was causing it.

Yeah, fucking network operator didn't tell us anything about maintenance work. Fuck you, too.

You know when you are suddenly push to a new position that you are not familiar with?

Well I just became a server database/cloud expert. Fuck me.

Been Googling for a while now. If anyone has any advice, I'll appreciate it.

Anything free and open source, even better.

Hello not a rant,

Are there MS SQL Server admins here who self taught and learn thru self study?

I work in a company where they use MS SQL Server as the database. I would love to 'understand' how to write efficient queries, and how things really work, not just selecting and joining table blindly and not understanding how things work.

Would you recommend how you understand MS SQL Server, or what learning path you took?

Thank you. I would appreciate any suggestions and comments.

I'm breaking out our authentication logic to a separate OIDC server. It's technically pretty straightforward, but just the thought of moving all those users and making sure that the communication between the system and the auth server works properly makes me shiver...

SO , i just ran into this database called ArangoDB and it claims to single handedly beat Mongo,Neo4j,Postgres and claims to be capable of handling any use case you can throw at it.

If anyone could verify this claim , such an ideal database just makes me question it's existence.

building a database is like building a bridge, one missing attribute and the whole application breaks

This rant can basically be boiled down to the name of the software in use/question:
FileMaker Pro 8.5

Please chime in if you have ever had the privelege of working with this gem of a database program, especially the scripting capabilities...

Trying to make it print/save/export an individual PDF file into a folder specified/created by one field with the filename set from another field. Will probably get it to work but the drag and drop scripting style reminds me of setting up an autoclicker for runescape; so fricken painful. Love to hear your comments.

Also happens to be running on an ancient PPC G5 iMac with 1 Gig of RAM running 10.4.11 hidden in the back room of an old warehouse with extra creepy flickering lights...

EFFF EMMM ELLL

So yeah thats my rainy Friday rant, hope you all are having this much fun.

Occasionally, some guys send badly written SQL to the database and drained most of the resources, then complain the db and apps using the db are not working.

I just don't get people designing database tables using VARCHAR/VARCHAR2 for columns that have numeric values in them, then use them as row identifiers.

I simply don't.

This story was related to me while I was in university.

So a long time ago, (in a galaxy far far away). This student was working as an intern at some tech company. He was running some queries, everything was fine. He decides that's good enough and heads for lunch.

When he comes back the query does not work. He notices the others around him start to stand up asking if anyone has a connection.

Turns out that an intern, at another building, basically deleted everything. I'm guessing they did not add this internship to their resume.

I don't care about warnings. My 1000 lines of code when I try to database

FUCK YOU EMOJIS! FUCK YOU AND YOUR EVER FUCKING GOD DAMN SPECIAL WAY OF BEING HANDLED.

Now that I have that part out...

I really fucking hate emoji at this time. Currently I'm working on one of my projects that has markdown support. One of the things I'm extendending the parser with is github style emoji (eg. :smile:) now this part works great. The problem however is getting that short code into a unicode char for HTML. And at the same time I have to take any unicode emoji inserted into the text box by phones and stuff and convert them into the shortcode (My database does support emoji but it's much nicer to store all emoji with the same standard)

All of this has taken 5 hours of research (needed a database of unicode -> short names) and several hours of converting the data from someone elses json into something I can use. (AKA Shrinking the damn file to only what I need) and now I've spent 5 more hours working on the actual code. And I still don't have it working properly.

why the fuck the nvarchar data type even exists

who'd use nvarchar data type in their right mind

working against a database over a bugged VPN connection, which gives you periodically timeouts, after the request takes 15 minutes 😑

Here is a little Story/Joke:

Once I was doing some work on our sql database and I showed my boss the query I wrote and he then told me that it is way to broad. It does the trick but it searches much more. So he showed me the right query and told me that a database is like a extremely easy to trigger person. So we want to ask only as little as possible to not get the database pissed. Since he told me that, it is now stuck in my brain and I will never forget to optimise my queries :D

I want to do some kind of simple note-taking web-app, with a Golang-Backend.
I need to choose a database, but don't have any clue about DBs.
Every note will consist of 3 strings, let's call them content, pubkey and privkey and I want to retrieve a saved note by searching for pubkey.
Can you recommend me any particular DB or at least an all-round solution ?

Should I learn a database language before backend, or vice versa? I’m thinking that I learning Rails and some form of SQL.

Always use colours on you database connections. Always!

the industry we try to make for them their first inhouse app, is having a lot of data that we need to import to the app. (machines, workers, materials, products, etc). The problem is that they want to give them to us in excel files, instead of making data entry. So thats ok for start, but after some point of complexity and relations we figured out that it turns to be a deadend.
How do you manage situations like this, with huge old fashion companies??

Found out a contractor stored 2.5 million rows of user info as json objects. 2.5 million is our sample size. Please tell me this is nuts right... Searching that would be taxing right?