I once nearly lost a contest because of a faulty SQL query on their side. If I didn&#x27;t get to see the query, I wouldn&#x27;t have been able to defend my entry and would&#x27;ve lost. Losing this contest would&#x27;ve been trivial, but if I applied this to a trial, it would be horrible.<p>The error was that a &#x27;group by&#x27; was used to find the number of unique entries, even though they had leading spaces, that were part of their uniqueness. Group by doesn&#x27;t take leading spaces into account, leading them to get a different result than me. I think that this could&#x27;ve happened to a lot of people, even forensic IT engineers.