5 Lessons from failure
Today I messed up. I'm a strong believer in sharing experiences of failure. If no one talks about the times they make mistakes, we're going to be doomed to repeat the same errors over and over again. So, here goes... Today I made a big mistake in a production application that resulted in 15 minutes of frantic database scripting and partial service interruption. I'm going to share what I did wrong, in part so that I focus on what I can do better next time but also because I don't want other people to make the same mistakes. Here's what happened. In our application we have some entities which use a natural key rather than a database generated primary key. This can make life easier when querying as you reduce the number of joins but still have referential integrity (with the cost of a bit of denormalisation). In the past, the whole DAL was hand coded SQL so it saved a considerable amount of developer time; we now use an ORM so we really don't care about the