T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget

Note: This is the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202. Your post should go live on September 8, 2026. All posts must be posted by 23:59 Pacific Time. Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo in your post and link it back to this invitation. Use the #tsql2sday hashtag when sharing on social media.

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.

A Little T-SQL Tuesday History

T-SQL Tuesday started back in 2009 when Adam Machanic invited SQL Server bloggers to write about a common topic and publish their posts on the same day. What started as a simple way for the community to share different perspectives has become a long-running SQL Server tradition.

Today, Steve Jones coordinates the event, and the posts are collected in the T-SQL Tuesday archive. Thanks, Steve, for selecting me to host this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. If you have never gone through the archive, there is a lot of good SQL Server knowledge and real-world experience in there.

One of the things I like about T-SQL Tuesday is seeing how people from different backgrounds approach the same topic. You often learn something new, and sometimes you find a story that sounds very familiar.

The Rules

The rules for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday are pretty simple.

1. Write a blog post about the topic.

Write about your most memorable SQL Server outage and share the story, the recovery, and the lessons you took away from it.

2. Publish your post on Tuesday, September 8, 2026.

That’s the publishing date for T-SQL Tuesday #202.

3. Link back to this invitation.

Please include a link to this invitation in your post so readers can find the topic and discover the other posts participating in this month’s T-SQL Tuesday.

4. Add your post to the comments.

Once your post is published, leave the link in the comments below so I can find it and include it in the roundup.

5. Keep company and customer information confidential.

Please don’t include anything that shouldn’t be publicly shared, such as customer information, credentials, server names, IP addresses, or other sensitive details. Change the names and details as necessary. The goal is to share what we learned from the experience.

Now Tell Us Your Story

I’m looking forward to reading these because outages are where a lot of our best lessons come from. The technical details are important, but I’m also interested in what happened around the technical problem, how you approached the situation, what decisions you had to make under pressure, and what you changed afterward.

Most of us have had that one SQL Server incident that made us learn something the hard way.

Maybe you were at home. Maybe you were in the office. Maybe you were asleep. Maybe, like me, you were at a party sitting in a kitchen with a laptop.

What’s yours?

Write about it, share it with the SQL Server community, and let’s see what we can learn from each other’s outage stories.