DataAware
Trick

October 2025
‍‍

🕷️ Welcome to the Data Hall of Horrors 🕷️

Real nightmares from the data engineering crypt. Enter if you dare...

Gallery of Terrors

‍

👻 The Ghost Schema

Last seen: 2019. Still haunting production.

A field that no one remembers creating. No documentation. No owner. It's in 47 downstream tables. Delete it? You wouldn't dare. It might be load-bearing legacy logic from the previous data architect... who left three years ago.

Horror Level: ████████░░ 8/10

‍

🧛 The Vampire Pipeline

It only runs at night. And it never finishes.

Scheduled for 2 AM. Estimated runtime: 45 minutes. Actual runtime: 6 hours. It feeds on your Snowflake credits and leaves nothing but timeout errors in its wake. You've tried to kill it. It always comes back.

Horror Level: █████████░ 9/10

‍

🎃 The Cursed CSV

"Just a simple file import," they said.

Commas in the data. Quotes around nothing. Random line breaks mid-field. A date column with seven different formats. Someone used Excel. Someone always uses Excel. The pipeline has failed 47 times. You're on attempt #48.

Horror Level: ██████████ 10/10

‍

🕸️ The Zombie Join

It was supposed to be temporary.

Written during a P0 incident at 11 PM. "We'll refactor it next sprint," you promised. That was 18 months ago. It's now in the critical path for every dashboard the C-suite looks at. The LEFT JOIN has become a CROSS JOIN. Nobody knows why it still works.

Horror Level: ███████░░░ 7/10

‍

🦇 The Frankenstein Data Model

Assembled from parts that were never meant to fit together.

Five different source systems. Three deprecated APIs. Two manual CSV uploads. One Excel macro that only works on Karen's laptop. And somehow, the CFO's most important metric depends on all of it running perfectly. In sequence. Every morning. By 6 AM.

Horror Level: █████████░ 9/10

‍

🔮 The Phantom Requirement

"The business needs it yesterday."

It appeared in your backlog overnight. No ticket history. No stakeholder name. Just "URGENT: Add customer lifetime value to the pipeline." You ask who requested it. Everyone points to someone else. You build it anyway. No one ever uses it.

Horror Level: ██████░░░░ 6/10

‍

🧟 The Undead Migration

Started in Q2. Still not finished.

"We're moving to Snowflake!" they announced with great fanfare. That was nine months ago. You're running dual systems. Paying for two data warehouses. The old one "will be sunset next month" for the sixth consecutive month. The zombie shuffle continues.