Hal please keep posting screwups.
Oooh yeah - I got in big big trouble for saying “asshole” before the phone was truly hung up. Ooops. But I was young and stupid, now I am not quite as much of either.
I’ll bite, since no one else is… um, no. Maybe I’m being dense today…
I think the first clue is “My Irreplaceable Table”. It’s like wearing a red shirt on the command deck of the Enterprise. May as well name it “MyTableI’mGoingToDeleteWithATinyTypo”.
Ah… gracias.
I’d say the constant inbreeding through marriage with cousins would pretty much do it.
He forgot to get rid of the line that did the DROP TABLE, so when he went and ran the script, he deleted the entire table and all of the data in it.
Oh, for the good old days when people screwed up directly instead of letting machines screw things up.
Oh - that sounds like the kind of thing that an “undo” button isn’t going to fix.
Oh, how I wish this were a joke post…unfortunately, I live this on a regular basis…
I sometimes picture you as a male Lucy Ricardo, hatching zany schemes and encountering mundane situations that you somehow manage to turn into major problems. You know that episode where she handcuffs herself to Ricky as a joke without checking to make sure she has the keys for the handcuffs first? I can totally imagine you doing something like that.
I’ve read and heard many, many helpdesk horror stories over the years, and I’ve gotten a chuckle or two out of them, but this is the first one that’s ever made me want to try to reach out across time and space to try to throttle someone.
Correct. No undo button in SQL, nor is there a dialog box that confirms if you really want to delete that data. Just the click on the “run” button or a press of the F5 key and faster than you can say “oh shit!”, several years of very important data have vanished.
I actually had a DBA who ended his very short career as my assistant by having two windows open, one looking at the production database and one looking at the temporary copy on the development server that he was experimenting with.
Any guesses as to which window he typed the “rm -rf *” (that is, delete everything with no appeal!) command into?
Thank god for tape backups.
I worked with one lady and she was going to send a cover letter and her resume from work.
Instead of sending it to the person she sent it to “global.”
This “global” meant anyone with an email address in that company got the resume 
The thing is, systems like that make it incredibly easy to accidently delete stuff. I am now incredibly careful with anything that starts with “DROP” or “DELETE.” I’ll usually comment out those words so I have to specifically highlight the statement in order to run it.
When fairly new to a job, my brother-in-law was formatting some diskette so he could back up some files.
Rather than “Format E:”, he managed to type “Format C:”, to be met with the message “Press any key to continue”. Instead of turning the computer off, he pressed <ESC>, but apparently the <ESC> counts towards ANY KEY. After formatting his hard drive, he got to spend the next several days recreating everything that was on the hard drive. This would have been before networked computers and overnight backups.
Ooooooh yeah.
Years ago, I was the data conversion person for a major system implementation. I had this script that would nuke-from-orbit all but reference data from the target database - used a LOT when I was running and troubleshooting the conversion scripts prior to go-live.
Add to this: a new-to-Oracle DBA trainee with admin rights and a sense of curiosity.
I stood there and watched her - while logged into PRODUCTION… as ADMIN… hit ctrl-V.
It turns out, she had - for reasons known only to her - been looking at that now-outdated script… and for reasons known only to her, selected and copied the entire contents of the script.
So before my horrified eyes, I saw:
TRUNCATE TABLE irreplaceable1;
TRUNCATE TABLE irreplaceable2;
DELETE FROM irreplaceable3;
etc.
I screamed “STOP” and she managed to interrupt it before EVERYTHING was gone… but, well, you can’t just do a rollback when you do a truncate-table command.
I was wordless with shock. The more-experienced DBA, who happened to be in the room also, was stunningly blase about it - said he should be able to retrieve it from the log tables.
Still… I suspect he had a rough night of it.