The Current Invitation
The current invitation (September 2026) is for T-SQL Tuesday #202. The next invitation should be released on October 6, 2026.
That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
Invitation and roundup from Marlon Ribunal
If you have been working with SQL Server for a while, chances are you have at least one outage that you still remember clearly. It might have happened years ago, and you probably still remember what time it happened, how you found out, what you were doing when the page came in, and what you had to do to get things back to normal.
I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to hear about that one outage that stands out in your memory. We all have incidents that stay with us long after the servers are back up and things have returned to normal. I’m looking forward to hearing those stories and seeing what we can learn from each other.
That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
Tell us about your most memorable SQL Server outage. It could have been a midnight page, a failed failover, a runaway query, a storage problem, a bad deployment, a server that simply would not come back up, or something else that brought production to a stop.
I’m interested in the whole story. What happened? How did you discover the problem? What did you check first? What did you try that worked, and what didn’t? How did you eventually get things back to normal?
Most importantly, what did you learn from the experience?
You don’t have to share the biggest outage you’ve ever dealt with. Maybe it was a relatively small incident that changed the way you approach backups, monitoring, failover, capacity planning, change management, or troubleshooting. Maybe it exposed a weakness in your environment that you didn’t know was there. Maybe it taught you something that you have carried with you throughout your career.
Share as much of the story as you can, including the things you wish you had known before the outage happened.
Since September is Labor Day month here in the US (September 7, 2026), I thought it would also be a good opportunity to recognize the people behind these systems. You can make your post as technical as you want, or you can focus more on the human side of the experience. After all, keeping databases online is not just about the technology. There are people behind those systems who have to respond when things go wrong, sometimes at the most inconvenient time.
My Own Outage Story
I have one of these stories myself, and it is an outage I don’t think I will ever forget because of the circumstances surrounding it.
I wrote about it in my blog post, Reflections on the Life of a DBA. It was a cold January evening, and I was at a black-tie party when the alerts started coming in. My phone was lighting up with Splunk On-Call alerts and Teams messages because an important SQL Server had gone down.
I had my work laptop with me, as I almost always did, so I found a corner in the busy kitchen, opened the laptop, and started working on the problem while everyone else continued with the evening. I still remember sitting there in a black suit with my laptop, troubleshooting SQL Server in the middle of a busy kitchen while a celebration was happening around me.
That is one of those moments from my DBA career that has stayed with me, and it is part of what inspired me to choose this month’s topic. We spend a lot of time talking about SQL Server features, performance tuning, architecture, and best practices, but some of the lessons that stay with us come from the times when something actually went wrong and we had to figure it out.
Now I’m curious about yours.