I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
vince.beehiiv.com
I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#2i dropped the dev database once at PayPal back in 2006
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#3I hope the poster will learn about transactions at some point. Postgres even lets you alter the schema within a transaction.
What I learned, once upon a time, is that with a database, you shouldn't delete data you want to keep. If you want to keep something, you use SQL's fine UPDATE to update it, you don't delete it. Databases work best if you tell them to do what you want them to do, as a single transaction.
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#4[deleted]
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#5Assuming storage cost is not a huge concern, I’m a big fan of soft deletes everywhere. Also leaves an easy “audit trail” to see who tried to delete something.
Of course - there are exceptions (gdpr deletion rules etc)
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#6I dropped the production database at the first startup I worked at, three days after we went live. We were scrappy™ and didn’t have backups yet, so we lost all the data permanently. I learned that day that running automated tests on a production database isn’t a good idea!
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#7I dunno. The effort needed to ensure you have backups is tiny compared to the work done to create the product. And to pull a backup before deleting stuff in production only needs a smidgen of experience.
They were extremely lucky. Imagine what the boss would have said if they hadn't managed to recover the data.
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#8The “and honestly?” phrase smells like AI writing to the point I stopped there and closed the post.
Don’t fuck your database up and do have point-in-time rollbacks. No excuses it’s not hard. Not something to be proud of.
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#9I dropped the production database at the first startup I worked at, three days after we went live. We were scrappy™ and didn’t have backups yet, so we lost all the data permanently. I learned that day that running automated tests on a production database isn’t a good idea!
I got deep pangs of pain and anguish for you and everyone involved. These lessons hurt so much to learn the hard way.
Re: I Dropped the Production Database on a Friday Night
#10Developing directly on the production database with no known backups. Saved from total disaster by pure luck. Then a bunch of happy talk about it being a "small price to pay for the lessons we gained" and how such failures "unleash true creativity". It's amazing what people will self-disclose on the internet.