Finally fixed my SQL join after 2 days of chasing an alias typo

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday debugging a report that kept returning duplicate rows. Turns out I had a leftover comma in my SELECT that was creating an extra unnamed column. Anyone else burn that much time on a single missing character?

2 comments

2 Comments

riley_price10d ago

Yeah the brain auto correcting thing is wild. I used to think "just read it out loud" was kind of a lazy excuse for not paying attention, but man I was wrong. After spending a whole morning in a sql script where I had "LEFT JOIN ON" written twice because of a copy-paste mistake, I started reading my code character by character out loud and it actually works. It feels ridiculous but catching those invisible errors is harder than people realize.

blairj5510d ago

and the worst part is you probably looked at it a dozen times and your brain just auto-corrected the typo every single time. i spent 3 hours once because i had "FROM" instead of "FORM" in a python script and kept scanning right past it. sql tooling really needs to do a better job of catching those invisible errors.