Big Numbers Cause Big Problems

I was tired this morning. Slept in an extra half hour. When I got in front of my computer, I started working on the task I had planned for today. My team lead calls me up and said there were problems during deployment to test. Okay. We looked at the logs for guidance.

The database error was that the code was trying to fit a large number into a NUMBER(9) column. Seems simple enough. I said we were probably selecting a column that was bigger than precision 9. We looked at the code. Nope. Source columns were also NUMBER(9).

Then I said we must be getting our insert and select order mixed up. This was a large insert statement. We pulled the column names and the values we were pulling into an Excel spreadsheet. Yep. Something got out of order in the select. Just a couple out of order can cause some pain.

A manager wanted to know what was going on. Why did this work in one environment and not another? Well it all depends on what type of data (and how big the numbers are) in the columns we got switched.

Further analysis of the rest of the SQL showed some more SQL statements out of whack.