BrentO posted about two mistakes he made as a DBA and I thought I'd share the two most unique ones from my career. The first one isn't exactly a database mistake, but I wrote a book about SQL Server 2000 for programmers called the Handbook for Reluctant Database Administrators. In the opening chapter, where I did a short history of databases, I included the following, taken from the Amazon.com Look inside feature:

Of course, what I meant to say was Grace Hopper, coiner of the term bug and compiler creator.

The second was when I added an index to a table. It was a fairly large table and it turned out that my index blocked access for the web sites using the table. By the time I realized that and killed the create, it still took another minute or so to roll back the index creation. Total down time for the sites? About 5 minutes, which is a year and a half in Internet time.

What mistakes have you made that you want to share?