The Sneaky PostgreSQL Bug That Cost Me 3 Hours (And How to Fix It in 3 Minutes)
It Started With a Simple Query… It was a regular Thursday afternoon. I was adding a bulk delete feature to our e-commerce platform when I hit “save” and watched the server restart. Everything compiled fine. The linter was happy. The tests passed. Then I clicked the “Delete Selected” button with no items selected. [15:59:28.503] ERROR: Internal server error DatabaseError: syntax error at or near ")" code: "42601" position: "5490" Syntax error? Near a parenthesis? I checked my SQL query three times. Four times. Copy-pasted it into pgAdmin and ran it manually. It worked perfectly. But in production? It failed every single time. Sound familiar? If you’ve ever seen this cryptic error message while working with PostgreSQL and Node.js, you’re not alone. And I’m about to save you the 3 hours I wasted tracking it down. The Culprit: A Pattern We’ve All Written Here’s what my code looked like: async function deleteProducts(productIds) { const result = await db.quer...