The Stomach-Dropping Mistake That Taught Me a Valuable Lesson in Tech
In the fast-paced world of technology, mistakes can happen swiftly and with far-reaching consequences. Reflecting on my own journey, I’d love to share a pivotal moment in my career that still gives me a bit of a chill when I think about it.
When I worked as an implementation consultant, I was in the early stages of mastering SQL. One day, a client requested that I delete specific records from their database. Our Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) had a handy feature that allowed me to run code sections by simply highlighting them. In my eagerness and slight inexperience, I confidently executed a command without thoroughly verifying my code. I ran the delete command without the necessary filters, and in an instant, I wiped millions of records from the production database during peak season—a disastrous oversight.
Fortunately, we were running Oracle 11g at that time and had just implemented the flashback functionality, which allowed us to restore the data to its previous state. This incident was a pivotal moment in my professional life and led to a significant change in how my team and I approached testing and production environments. From that day forward, we made it a strict policy to always use test environments before rolling out any significant changes to production.
This experience taught me the importance of double-checking my work and the value of thorough testing—lessons that I carry with me to this day. I’d love to hear about your experiences. What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve encountered in your tech career, and what did you learn from them? Let’s share our stories and support each other in this ever-evolving industry!
Share this content:
