In the Happy Database movies, SQL Server is benign and friendly, with no scary surprises lurking around the next corner. In these movies:

• People work together
• No-one but the DBA can make changes to production
• People tell us in advance when they want to change something
• When query performance degrades, we’re notified about it
• Third Party vendors only deploy good changes
• Deployment scripts always work perfectly

Back in the real world of SQL Server, not all of these are true all of the time and the result is that we spend long weekends slaving over fixes for things that should never have been broken in the first place, or that we should have known about before they became a big problem….

Read my Six Scary SQL Surprises at Red Gate.