Necessary rant

From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com>
Date: Sat Dec 6 12:43:25 2003

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Patrick Rigney wrote:

> > <RANT FRUSTRATION=HIGH>
> > Who's the asshole that decided an UPDATE command in SQL without a WHERE
> > clause defaults to ALL?
> > </RANT>
>
> Ouch. Same for DELETE by the way.

I know, which made it easy to zap the table so I could reload it :)

I mean, I knew that this is the behavior of the UPDATE and DELETE
commands, but when you're not paying attention you can easily hork up your
database. TOO easily! It's just stupid!

> This may be a good opportunity to pick up the thread about MySQL and other
> databases. :-)
>
> One of the things that mission-critical-appropriate databases provide, IMHO,
> is a running transaction log or similar mechanism that facilitates not only
> transaction management and rollback, but also backup and recovery up to a
> point in time. I'm pretty sure MySQL doesn't offer this. Does anyone know
> if PostgreSQL does?

How about just modifying the command to require an ALL clause to delete or
update all, rather than that being the default behavior? You'd think this
would be the case. WHO is the jackass that designed this?

Fortunately, MySQL tables are easy to backup. Just copy the files in the
data directory. It would be nice to have rollback features though.

-- 
Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers   ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com  || at http://marketplace.vintage.org  ]
Received on Sat Dec 06 2003 - 12:43:25 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:49 BST