--- title: You Just Found Bad Data in Production. Now What? | daily.dev description: A practical playbook for handling bad data discovered in production, covering six ordered steps: triage before touching anything, contain the spread, trace the... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/you-just-found-bad-data-in-production-now-what--nerttjamy twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: You Just Found Bad Data in Production. Now What? | daily.dev og:description: A practical playbook for handling bad data discovered in production, covering six ordered steps: triage before touching anything, contain the spread, trace the... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/you-just-found-bad-data-in-production-now-what--nerttjamy og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/nertTJAmy.png og:image:alt: You Just Found Bad Data in Production. Now What? og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # You Just Found Bad Data in Production. Now What? **[SQL Authority](https://daily.dev/sources/sql-authority)** · 5 min read · 3 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A practical playbook for handling bad data discovered in production, covering six ordered steps: triage before touching anything, contain the spread, trace the root cause rather than patching symptoms, fix and verify the fix, communicate to affected stakeholders, and run a short blameless post-incident review. The core message is to resist the urge to immediately change data, slow down to diagnose first, and treat the incident as complete only when the fix is verified and lessons are documented. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What are the steps to follow when bad data is discovered in a production database? Follow six steps in order: triage to understand what is wrong and how far it spread, contain the source to stop further damage, trace the issue upstream to its root cause rather than patching the visible symptom, fix and then verify the fix actually worked, notify everyone who relied on the bad value, and hold a short blameless review to prevent recurrence. _daily.dev surfaces practical playbooks like this for engineers building their own data incident process._ ### Why does fixing a wrong value in a database often not solve a data quality problem permanently? Directly editing a visible wrong value only patches the symptom rather than the cause, so the bad number often reappears later, for example the following week. The value seen in a report or dashboard is the end of a chain built from a transformation reading a source feed; the fix must trace backward through that lineage to the actual broken stage to stick. _Engineers debugging recurring data issues use daily.dev to find grounded, experience-based fixes._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Before You Fix the Bug, Make Sure You Understand the Problem](https://daily.dev/posts/before-you-fix-the-bug-make-sure-you-understand-the-problem-ifoiqdpal) · Medium · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Your First Production Incident Isn’t a Matter of If — It’s When.](https://daily.dev/posts/your-first-production-incident-isn-t-a-matter-of-if-it-s-when--fwbiahpee) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Notes on incidents](https://daily.dev/posts/notes-on-incidents-noabbvg3s) · sean goedecke · 45 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#backend](https://daily.dev/tags/backend), [#sql](https://daily.dev/tags/sql), [#data-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/data-engineering), [#data-quality](https://daily.dev/tags/data-quality) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/you-just-found-bad-data-in-production-now-what--nerttjamy) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"You Just Found Bad Data in Production. 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