This morning I was investigating a problem at a customer site where their Manager (a program I wrote most of) is hanging. Thanks to “kill -3 pid” I discovered it was building a tool tip. Thanks to a database query, I found that the tool tip it was building was trying to display 430,000+ identical date ranges. Hmmm, looks like we’re going to be a while, and probably a little short of screen real estate at the same time.
I did a few database commands to remove the 430,000+ records and put back one copy of it. (I’m sure somebody has a command that will do both in one step – I did a “delete” followed by an “insert” because I’m lame.)
The Field Engineer at the customer site wrote to ask if I could tell him the database commands in case this happens again. I politely declined. I told my boss that this would be somewhat like giving handguns and tequila to a bunch of 9 year old boys. Repeat after me:
I’m sorry, you appear to have totally hosed the database. You’re going to have to wipe the database and re-injest all your content. You’ll probably be up and running again in two days or so.