I spent most of my morning chasing a sneaky little bug. Basically, once upon a time one of our tables contained a column (to protect the innocent, let's say it was called Meaningless_Data). Several months ago, my team removed the column from the DB schema as well as all references to it in the code.

I grabbed the changes and continued on my merry way... until today, which apparently is the first time I've tried to use a function that touches that particular table. I kept getting an error:

So it's looking for the column and not finding it. Not surprising, since we deliberately deleted it a long time ago. I triple-checked the code, but couldn't find a single reference to Meaningless_Data in any SQL statement (or anywhere else in the codebase, for that matter).

I drove myself batty for way too long before copying the query straight from CFCATCH.SQL and manually running it against my local DB. Same error. Okay, it's not a Coldfusion issue...

Then I ran it against the DB on our development server. Worked like a charm. Getting warmer...

I generated SQL scripts for the table on each machine and diffed them, and the culprit was revealed. A trigger was pointing to the missing column, and was firing every time I touched the table. The other developer had updated the triggers on his local DB and the dev server, but when I grabbed the schema and code updates, I didn't think to look there.

File under lessons learned.

As a web developer, I often find myself in need of professional help. (Don't we all?) Sometimes all that stands between me and a completed project is a quick Coldfusion, SQL, or Actionscript example. At times like these, I turn to Google.

Much of the time I can find what I need in the first few search results. A code example here, a syntax clarification there. One site that used to bug me, however, was Experts-Exchange.com.

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