Spent a whole week debugging a SQL query that was missing one comma

I was trying to pivot some sales data for Q3 in Birmingham and kept getting null values everywhere. After 7 days of checking every join and filter, I finally noticed a missing comma in the SELECT statement. Has anyone else burned that much time on something so dumb?

2 comments

2 Comments

kelly.emma11d ago

@ward.fiona oh yeah, it was in the column list. The weird thing is how life mirrors that - you'll spend a week looking for some big obvious mistake and it's always the smallest, dumbest little thing that's been staring you in the face the whole time.

ward.fiona11d ago

Oh man, was it a missing comma in the column list or in the FROM clause? I once spent three days chasing a bug in a stored procedure, only to find I'd left out a single character in a variable name.