This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry.
Around 2016, I was working as a PHP developer at Racing Post in London. The Post is best known for horse-racing news, form and results, but behind the public-facing products sat a large collection of systems for processing all kinds of racing and greyhound data. The application I worked on used that data to produce periodic reports.
This was the PHP 5 era. The language had already powered serious web applications for years, although many companies also carried the history that accumulated around those applications. Ours depended on Sybase, an enterprise relational database that was once a common sight in large organizations.
PHP did not communicate with Sybase through a neat modern package installed with Composer, it used a native extension written in C. Production ran on Linux, while our local development environments ran in Vagrant virtual machines. At the same time, the company was migrating its source code from Subversion to Git. We had several generations of technology living beside one another, and most days they cooperated. Then production began to fail.
When queries returned nothing
