21–30 of 137 posts
I was sitting at my desk watching service after service slowly disappear in utter confusion, then hours spent cleaning...
I was on my way out the door at my first job, and an SEO person stopped me and asked me if I could fix something. I just needed to delete a single row from a database. Easy enough. I get as far as “DELETE FROM table_name” and for some unknown reason run the damn thing without a WHERE. All the rows, gone! We did have nightly backups but the guy with access to them was notoriously hard to get the attention of and lived…
Always write DELETEs as SELECTs, and once you run the SELECT and it returns the rows you want, then swap out the SELECT * with a DELETE.
I was on my way out the door at my first job, and an SEO person stopped me and asked me if I could fix something. I just needed to delete a single row from a database. Easy enough. I get as far as “DELETE FROM table_name” and for some unknown reason run the damn thing without a WHERE. All the rows, gone! We did have nightly backups but the guy with access to them was notoriously hard to get the attention of and lived…
Always write DELETEs as SELECTs, and once you run the SELECT and it returns the rows you want, then swap out the SELECT * with a DELETE.
Another tip is to write the WHERE clause and SET clause prior to filling in which table is being updated. That way you can’t accidentally run something prematurely.
I've seen a DBA drop a production table as well, fortunately it was a small in memory table for non persisting data that could be quickly repopulated. Still lead to about 5 mins of downtime. I always have two terminals open, both running tmux. One is white text on black for dev work, the other is white text on red. I only ever ssh into production servers on the white on red terminal so there's a strong visual signal…
I used to do the same thing with RDPs to windows production servers. I'd set up a different colored color scheme on each computer, with prod being bright red :)
I was logged in over VPN to a client machine. I suspected the problem I was fixing was something to do with the network misbehaving. It was a Windows machine.
I thought "I know: I'll disable and reenable the network device!".
A few moments later: "Oh. Bugger.".
Shortly followed by an embarrassing call to the client's IT department to ask them to reenable the network device on that machine...
I was on my way out the door at my first job, and an SEO person stopped me and asked me if I could fix something. I just needed to delete a single row from a database. Easy enough. I get as far as “DELETE FROM table_name” and for some unknown reason run the damn thing without a WHERE. All the rows, gone! We did have nightly backups but the guy with access to them was notoriously hard to get the attention of and lived…
Always write DELETEs as SELECTs, and once you run the SELECT and it returns the rows you want, then swap out the SELECT * with a DELETE.
Probably one of the stupidest, but also the most personally effective way to learn anything.
I was on my way out the door at my first job, and an SEO person stopped me and asked me if I could fix something. I just needed to delete a single row from a database. Easy enough. I get as far as “DELETE FROM table_name” and for some unknown reason run the damn thing without a WHERE. All the rows, gone! We did have nightly backups but the guy with access to them was notoriously hard to get the attention of and lived…
If you want to delete all rows, you should be made to explicitly type out that intention.