Fake Debugging II: The Race Condition Strikes Back | Ankush Menat

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2024-12-25 15:30:14

"અધૂરું જ્ઞાન હોવા કરતા કશું ન જાણવું વધુ સારું છે."

This is a story of how I "fake debugged" one of the worst multi-threading bugs we saw at work around 2 years ago and then how I really debugged it yesterday.

Multiple users at work reported getting column "name" is ambiguous errors randomly while doing anything. This is an error reported by MySQL when you use a column name without specifying which table it belongs to and if it's present in more than one table in the query.

First, I started by looking at error logs to see if there was any common pattern. All of these errors were caused by weird queries that no one would ever write themselves.

"Pick List" is a document for warehouse operators to work on order fulfillment. Why would anyone ever join the OAuth table with the Pick List table? This query makes no sense.