The benefit of T-SQL 3 part naming
So yesterday I made the second ever major technical boo-boo of my career - I accidentally ran a dynamic "DROP TABLE" script on an extremely large, high-availability system. The last time I did something of this magnitude was literally when I first started out with T-SQL, and I ran a load of DROP / CREATE PROC statements on a similar sized system, right in the middle of rush hour; instantly breaking the 500 of so clients that were connected to it. Obviously this kind of thing is very embarrassing, not to mention the massive inconvenience caused throughout the departments using the system. Luckily the database is backed up hourly (thank you Mr DBA), and although I made the mistake 6 minutes before the next back up, the impact was relatively minimal due to the main user's being in a departmental meeting. I'm blogging to outline my mistake and document changes to my T-SQL script, which up until 13:34 yesterday, made my life considerably easier and I thought was the dog