Irrational debugging

You execute your report and it comes up empty. You spent the last hour making changes both in the underlying data structures and in the code that queries and formats the data. You are certain, however, that your modifications could not have made the report disappear.

You call your internal support hotline to find out if there is a network problem, even though File Manager clearly shows access to network drives. You further probe as to whether the database has gone down, even though you just connected successfully. You spend another ten minutes of the support analyst's time running through a variety of scenarios before you hang up in frustration.

"They don't know anything over there," you fume. You realize that you will have to figure this one out all by yourself. So you dive into the code you just modified. You are determined to check every single line until you find the cause of your difficulty. Over the course of the next two hours, you talk aloud to yourself—a lot.

"Look at that! I called the stored procedure inside an IF statement. I never did that before. Maybe you can't call stored programs that way." So you remove the IF statement and instead use a GOTO statement to perform the branching to the stored procedure. But that doesn't fix the problem.

"My code seems fine. But it calls this other routine that Joe wrote ages ago." Joe has since moved on, making him a ripe candidate for the scapegoat. "It probably doesn't work anymore; after all, we did upgrade to a new voicemail system." So you decide to perform a standalone test of Joe's routine, which hasn't changed for two years and has no interface to voicemail. But his program seems to work fine—when it's not run from your program.

Now you are starting to get desperate. "Maybe this report should only run on weekends. Hey, can I put a local module in an anonymous block? Maybe I can use only local modules in procedures and functions! I think maybe I heard about a bug in this tool. Time for a workaround . . . "

You get angry and begin to understand why your eight-year-old hits the computer monitor when he can't beat the last level of Ultra Mystic Conqueror VII. And just as you are ready to go home and take it out on your dog, you realize that you are connected to the development database, which has almost no data at all. You switch to the test instance, run your report, and everything looks just fine.

Except, of course, for that GOTO and all the other workarounds you stuck in the report . . .