About SQL How-To

The things we got wrong

This page is a list of mistakes we made—what we got wrong, how we found out, and what we did about it. It’s not a showcase of our best work, but a record of the times we failed at the things we promised to do.

A site like this publishes a log of corrections because it’s the only way to prove it’s real. If we only showed the work that went right, you’d have no way to know if we were telling the truth.

But if we admit to the mistakes—and keep them public—you can trust the rest.

Three we had to fix

The log starts with the worst of them, listed in order of how much damage they did. These aren’t small errors or minor oversights. They’re the kind of failures that make you question whether the site should exist at all.

What those three changed

These mistakes didn’t just get fixed—they rewrote the rules for how we work. The log isn’t just a list of errors; it’s proof that we actually learn from them.

The people behind this

Marguerite Fontaine is the founder and editor of *SQL How-To*, and the only person who signs off on the corrections. She runs this site because she’s spent years fixing tech problems for people who didn’t know where to start—and because she’s tired of sites that treat mistakes as something to hide.

The log exists because she believes the only way to earn trust is to show the work where it failed.

Keeping a public log of mistakes isn’t comfortable. It means admitting when you were wrong in front of people who might have noticed sooner than you did. It means writing corrections while the error is still fresh, before you’ve had time to justify it.

And it means knowing that every time you make a mistake, someone will read it—and that’s the point. The discomfort is the proof.

Marguerite’s first real tech mistake wasn’t public. It was the time she accidentally reformatted a hard drive during a Windows reinstall, losing years of family photos in the process.

She was sixteen, and she fixed it by borrowing a neighbor’s laptop and using a recovery tool—then swore she’d never touch a command line again. She changed her mind when she realized how much easier it made things once you knew what you were doing.

If you find a mistake here, the contact page is where to tell us. Not to scold, not to argue, but to help us fix it before someone else gets hurt by it.

There will be a next one

This log isn’t finished. There will be more mistakes, and when there are, they’ll go up here too. The only way this site stays useful is if we keep the corrections public—and if readers like you help us find them before they cause real problems.

If you spot something wrong, the contact page is where to let us know.