Biggest Mess

As a DBA, what is the biggest problem or mess you have had to clean up in a SQL Server.

If you have been a DBA for long enough, at some point you must have inherited a problem that someone else created, but it’s your problem to fix.

I can think on several big problems, for instance one system that I worked in, just before my involvement a developer had attempted to replace all the INTEGER IDENTITY primary keys with UNIQUEIDENTIFIERs. There were around 250 table where a bulk migration script had been run to do the following.

1. Drop the foreign keys.
2. Rename the primary key column with an underscore in front of it. Don’t delete it because nobody was confident it wouldn’t work.
3. Create a new primary key column as a uniqueidentifier, named the same as the original column. Fix up all the broken foreign keys to point to the new uniqueidentifier column, and hope that anything works.
4. Then automatically build scripts that generate c# classes based on the new uniqueidentifer script. Then use those c# classes to build applications that will take the next 3 years to eliminate.

Cleaning up this mess literally took 4 years, and rewriting the application to get the system back to a point that it could scale and could be maintained.

Had this mess not been cleaned up the company would not have been able to scale to the point that it did in the time I worked on that system. Instead it would have crumbled and put the company out of business.

Now the person who caused this did not do it with bad intentions, in fact he is a great developer who was working with the best information that was available at that time. I would certainly enjoy the opportunity to work with him again.

That is certainly the biggest mess that I ever had to clean up that someone else made. I provided me with several years of employment, and was a challenge to clean up, but it was a success to get it cleaned up.

Please share with me… what is the biggest mess that you have had to clean up?

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