My entire project blew up after I fat-fingered a single line of code

Deleted 3 days of database work in like 2 seconds just because I forgot a WHERE clause and now I gotta rebuild everything from scratch, has anyone else made a stupid mistake like this and how did you deal with it?

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3 Comments

kai_bennett3mo ago

Lost a whole weekend that way. Coping mechanism: crying.

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ericp673mo ago

Ah man, that's the worst. I read somewhere that forgetting a WHERE clause is literally the number one database mistake people make, it's basically a rite of passage. @kai_bennett I feel you on the crying, I think every dev has done their fair share of that after a wipeout like this. At least now you'll never forget that WHERE again.

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the_mary3mo ago

Twelve years ago I worked at a place where a junior dev did this to their entire customer orders table. The company had to close for two days while they restored from a backup from the previous night. That backup was on tape. Took forever. The owner almost fired the kid on the spot. Looking back, that's probably the real reason most companies make you write SELECT first before DELETE in production. Not a rite of passage so much as a lawsuit waiting to happen.

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