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Don’t call it “accidental database deletion”. Call it “unannounced live exercise of backup procedure”.
Either that or rapid exodus from the country
Embrace it as you are now officially a developer
At some point this is just a rite of passage
Ouch. Gotta wrap those deletes in a transaction and look before it rolls forward. Lessons learned. Time to see if the backups actually have any data on them.
I did quite a few bad things like that early on. Now I never type UPDATE or DELETE without first doing a SELECT and WHERE. It’s easy to convert to a DELETE and UPDATEs tend to effect only a few fields at a time so the extra effort is worth the peace of mind. It’s a good habit to form, I can’t even think of the last time I did anything horrible.
Sometimes I dream of getting fired for accidentally doing shit like this. Sweet relief…
Good companies wouldn’t fire someone for this because:
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There should be processes in place to prevent this, or recover from this, anyway. It’s a team/department failure and you would just be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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They now know you’ve experienced this and will hopefully know to never do it again. Bringing in someone else could just reintroduce the issue.
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DB admins rawdogging the prod postgres on a Friday evening.
I don’t even work with databases but I still have a fear of possibly doing this someday.
If it happens, it’s a lack of controls, and, at least mostly, not your fault
I did something like that once, I wasn’t very good at SQL but I needed some data, so I logged in into the production database and run my SELECT queries, I didn’t change anything so everything was good, or so I thought.
I created a cross product over tables with millions of entries and when it didn’t respond I thought it was odd but it was time to go home anyway. On the way home they called me and asked what I did. They had to restart the DB server because once the cache timed out one application after another started failing.
You just triggered my PTSD
“I didn’t put a WHERE clause in that DELETE statement”
As a side note, DBeaver actually asks for confirmation if it thinks you are about to do something wonky. I think it’s quite telling just how common this mistake is. We’ve all been there
Update and delete should require a where clause. You can always use true or 1 = 1, the gain from omitting it is minimal.
The fact that no DBMS ever decided to implement this, not even as an option is quite distressing.
