Using common sense and critical thinking is crucial in our industry, especially once you reach a senior IT position. You want things to make sense, and when troubleshooting a problem, it usually helps to stay grounded in comparing how things are with how things should be. However, in some rare cases, you can come across things that don't quite make sense in the real world, even though they are normal in the tech sphere. This is an example of such a case, and why you need to be careful when using SQL without understanding all the special use cases that come with it. In our scenario, we had a database table that an application was querying. The table had a column called "sold" containing an integer value. That value could be 0 or 1, although technically since it's an integer, it could also contain any other numeric value as well. The application checked whether the value was equal to 1, or whether it was not. Here are the SQL queries in question along with the results
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