Representative Line: Both Ways Bug Me

There are many cases where some sort of debugging block sneaks by, especially cases where we see preprocessors or templates working, which leave us with nonsense like if (true == false) running in production. But Codemonkey found a new twist on that sort of thing, in a SQL query being run in production.

WHERE (some conditions) AND (1 = 0 OR (1 = 1 AND (other conditions)))

The OR means that by twiddling the first equality check, we can toggle "always return rows" with "return based on condition". Toggling the second we can make it "never return rows", which I'm not certain is actually useful. I can see how these likely did start life as debugging flags, but they're still weird, still unnatural. They point to some other problem in observability in the code. And, as all "good" flags go, they're not documented anywhere, this seems like it started life as a query an analyst was running until it got turned into stored procedure to be run again and again. The flags have never been changed since the code was released, as far as anyone can tell.

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