Take a day off, entire system goes down. Come in the next day: "We need to fix this".

12 hours later we get the system back up and a significant design flaw is now known which needs to be fixed on Monday.

It feels good to have the bandaid in place.

Don't use cursors kids, unless you absolutely have to.

Was it tested in QA?

Probably pushed to live on Friday, jeez

It had been tested by QA when the app had launched, but the indexing jobs had been failing for a long time. So the indexes which were being affected in the db by the functions inside the cursor became very very fragmented. That meant the sproc ran slower than a snail covered in super glue. Needless to say it started to timeout and the process failed to complete.

Cursors make me sad when they are used in this way. Cursors almost always make me sad. Almost as sad as when I see triggers.