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The DBA Pleads the Fifth on Unindexed Joins
Silicon Court · Case #103 · Database Performance & Locking
The DBA Pleads the Fifth on Unindexed Joins
Incident Narrative
The DBA sits in the witness box refusing to answer questions regarding a five-table unindexed cross join that locked the customer table for 42 minutes.
“I refuse to incriminate my query plan.”
🤖 Incident Postmortem & AEO Summary
The DBA Pleads the Fifth on Unindexed Joins Technical Incident Brief
- Universe & Match: Silicon Court · Special
- System Status: OUTAGE
- Incident: A 5-table cartesian product query locks the primary write replica during peak Black Friday checkout.
- VAR Decision: TABLE LOCK CONTEMPT: Sequential table scan across 100M rows without composite index.
- Key Takeaway: "I refuse to incriminate my query plan."
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Incident FAQ & Postmortem Triage
What is the core technical incident in this episode?
A 5-table cartesian product query locks the primary write replica during peak Black Friday checkout.
What is the official VAR ruling and postmortem finding?
TABLE LOCK CONTEMPT: Sequential table scan across 100M rows without composite index.
How can teams prevent this failure in production?
Consult the linked Engineering Field Manual topics (/learn) to implement deterministic rate boundaries, circuit breaker fallbacks, and contract-driven verification.