This is my second time hosting T-SQL Tuesday and I am excited to do it again.

With this being the second week of 2026 it is most likely that time of year that you have already forgotten those New Year’s Resolutions you made a few weeks ago.

With this first T-SQL Tuesday of the year, I want to help you mark off a couple of items from your list. Blogging more and reliving past mistakes.

Maybe just marking one item off your list.

Why Mistakes?

Mistakes, as painful as they seem while dealing with their results, are a major part of the learning process. While so much knowledge can be obtained from school, books, blogs, coworkers, friends, etc.; let’s face it, we learn more from experiences. And while success teaches lessons, the lessons that stick with you the most are failures.

There are lots of types of errors we make when creating and programming with T-SQL, even as seasoned professionals. Maybe you dropped an object, set up security wrong and were hacked, highlighted some code and missed a WHERE clause, messed up the backup sequence, calculated some figure like sales tax wrong, or worse yet, you designed a database that is used for years and years and there are issues you can’t get the time to fix so you get to deal with them every time you write a query in that database. These are all fictional examples, of course. Of course. Sigh.

As a professional programmer gaining more and more experience, the mistakes you make will become less and less frequent, sometimes not occurring for months or years. But accidents will happen, and sometimes they can be more consequential as your experience grows because you have more responsibility, more access, and more control.

The question is what will you do after that mistake when it happens.

This is T-SQL Tuesday of course, but feel free to participate with any mistakes you have made and learned from in data or any technical discipline if you want. The more the merrier.

The Request

Let others learn from one of your mistakes.

This month, I am asking you to share about a mistake you made that touches on data in some way. Whatever the mistake was, maybe when you were a complete newbie, maybe just last week.

Then, after describing your biggest error, share the lesson you learned. What did you do to ensure it didn’t happen again? New practices, added safeguards, anything that can help the readers understand how to avoid the mistake you made.

Note: be sure to anonymize your stories enough so you don’t share anything that you shouldn’t. That is a mistake you do not want to learn from by experience.

This invitation is a week later than normal as I am filling in for someone, so posts are due Tuesday, January 20, 2026.