I can relate to this with my own story, where I managed to delete an entire database — my first day on the job, no less.
I was hired by a little photo development company, doing both walk in jobs and electronic B2B orders. I was brought in to pick up on the maintenance and development of the B2B order placement web service the previous developer had written.
Sadly, the previous dev designed the DB schema and software under the assumption that there would only ever be one business customer. When that ceased to be the case, he decided to simply create another database and spin up another process.
So here I am on my first day, tasked with creating a new empty database to bring on another customer. I used the Microsoft SQL Server admin GUI to generate the DDL from one of the existing tables, created (and switched the connection to) a pristine, new DB, and ran the script.
Little did I know, in the middle of many thousands of lines of SQL, the script switched the connection back to the DB from which the DDL was generated, and then proceeds to drop every single table.
Oops.
Of course, the last dev disabled back ups a couple months before I joined. My one saving grace was that the dev had some strange fixation on logging every single thing that happened in a bunch of XML log files; I managed to quickly write some code to rebuild the state of the DB from those log files.
I was (and am) grateful to my boss for trusting my ability to resolve the problem I had created, and placing as much value as he did in my ownership of the problem.
That was about 16 years ago. One of the best working experiences in my career, and a time of rapid technical growth for myself. I would have missed out on a lot if that had been handled differently.
I was hired by a little photo development company, doing both walk in jobs and electronic B2B orders. I was brought in to pick up on the maintenance and development of the B2B order placement web service the previous developer had written.
Sadly, the previous dev designed the DB schema and software under the assumption that there would only ever be one business customer. When that ceased to be the case, he decided to simply create another database and spin up another process.
So here I am on my first day, tasked with creating a new empty database to bring on another customer. I used the Microsoft SQL Server admin GUI to generate the DDL from one of the existing tables, created (and switched the connection to) a pristine, new DB, and ran the script.
Little did I know, in the middle of many thousands of lines of SQL, the script switched the connection back to the DB from which the DDL was generated, and then proceeds to drop every single table.
Oops.
Of course, the last dev disabled back ups a couple months before I joined. My one saving grace was that the dev had some strange fixation on logging every single thing that happened in a bunch of XML log files; I managed to quickly write some code to rebuild the state of the DB from those log files.
I was (and am) grateful to my boss for trusting my ability to resolve the problem I had created, and placing as much value as he did in my ownership of the problem.
That was about 16 years ago. One of the best working experiences in my career, and a time of rapid technical growth for myself. I would have missed out on a lot if that had been handled differently.