You know that moment when you write a query, and it doesn’t return what you expected? Not because it’s broken, the syntax is fine, but because it exposes that your understanding of the data, or the world behind it, is off.
That happened to me last week.
I was trying to build a clean report from a dataset I thought I knew well. I wrote a query, confident, structured, even elegant, and ran it. The result was almost right, which is worse than completely wrong. That’s when I realized: every SQL query is a little philosophical act. It’s a belief made code.
You think you’re asking for, say, “all active users who logged in last week.” But under that, you’re assuming you know what active means. You’re assuming you know what counts as a login. You’re assuming last week is a universal constant, not a timezone minefield. Even the joins you choose are silent statements: this table matters, that one doesn’t; this relationship is 1:1, this other one can be safely flattened.
In that sense, querying is self-revealing. The moment you write WHERE status = 'active', you’re not just filtering data, you’re declaring what matters. And when the result comes back wrong or strange, it’s often your mental model, not the data, that needs debugging.
Funny thing is, I’ve had the same kind of moment in conversations with people. You ask someone how they’re doing, and you assume the answer will fit into a tidy enum: good, fine, tired, busy. But sometimes the answer is weird, or messy, or doesn’t fit, and suddenly you see the structure of your question was too narrow for the truth of the other person.
I guess that’s the shared thread. Whether it’s code or conversation, we’re always trying to shape ambiguity into something usable. But every structure has a cost. Every simplification leaves something out.
That’s why I’ve learned to look at my queries not just as tools, but as mirrors. If something feels off in the result, maybe it’s pointing at a blind spot in me, a lazy assumption, a hurried logic, a desire to make things cleaner than they really are.
There’s something humbling in that. Something worth listening to.
Because sometimes, the query works perfectly… and still doesn’t feel true.