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Comment by ekimekim | Hacker News Reader

"Dangerous" is probably the wrong word - anomalous is a better one. Most software doesn't need to know, say, how many entries there are in the Users table. It generally is querying for a specific user, or a range of users with some particular property.

It sounds like they had some software watching for any out-of-the-ordinary queries, which they then manually verified with the apparent person who was executing them. When that person had no idea what they were talking about, that's when the red flags went up.

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Your example with the user table is a little bit 'bad'. Because yes i like to see statistics as an admin on how many user acounts are there :P

Well put. I think that anything I personally do while logged into a database when viewed from any higher level going to look anomalous.

That said, I wonder if what’s going on here is that the admin account was never supposed to be used directly, so that’s why the alert triggered.

well gosh i hope you're not running queries on the command line on a production database.

So you routinely log in as an admin and run sql queries directly on a production DB? That seems quite a bit more "bad" than the example.

phpMyAdmin or something might run on behalf of the administrator and do these queries.

I do it several times per day. When you are maintaining a piece of garbage application, completely undersized, absurdly opened in term of filtering and extremely badly designed, it's the only way to manage this mess, not to mention the times when I have to fix the DB by hand, replaying, with some manual tweaks, queries normaly executed by the application.

And unfortunately, I don't think that's so uncommon.

It's not particularly common but I've been in some what of a similar situation. If you're a senior techy person I'd suggest taking a bit of time to either find a new position (as I'm sure all of HN would echo, simply for your sanity) or I'd suggest taking that time to assemble a report about how your spend your hours each day and make sure it bubbles up past your manager to someone who deals with money.

That sort of situation is constantly costing the company money for no good reason, it'd be fiscally sound to spell out these costs and contrast them with any estimates you could assemble on making the application start working again. Manually replaying queries is expensive, terrible, terrifying, and can potentially break data-integrity really badly.

> assemble a report about how your spend your hours each day and make sure it bubbles up past your manager to someone who deals with money

Assumes poster works at a company where management cares past "Does it work?"

That's less rare than it used to be, but HN sometimes underappreciates how much of the economy is still governed by companies with CFOs who couldn't tell you the first thing about their enterprise infrastructure.

They -always- care about money. That is why I said to focus it on hours and pass it to someone who deals with money. If you focus it on best practices and tech trends then there may be no one who will care but (except in real dumpsterfire companies, which often includes start ups) someone always cares about the money.

I don't even think its bad practice.

I was the lone technical hire at a startup I was at a couple of years ago. We ran our app on top of postgres, and I used a native macos postgres client to keep an eye on our database (accessed via an SSH tunnel). The startup is very high-touch with clients - we built personal relationships with our clients.

Unsurprisingly our CEO loved looking at the numbers and the data. We could see conversion, and keep an eye on what our users were up to and how they were using our product. I was the sole engineer and I was only working 3 days a week. I didn't have time to build monitoring dashboards and all that; so instead I spent half an hour teaching our CEO the basics of how to do postgres read queries, and how to pull the results of a query out into CSV and into excel. That was probably the most productive half hour of my time at that startup - it was a huge enabler for him, allowing him to explore the data in arbitrary ways. I showed him how to sort, filter, select specific fields and join tables.

If I had instead built a specialised dashboard, it would have taken me away from our product. And I wouldn't have any idea what queries to display - any dashboard I made would have been worse for him than just querying the database directly. I'm still convinced that I made the right call.

(We did eventually build a dedicated admin panel, but months later - only when we actually needed it because some common tasks were too difficult through SQL alone).

Nothing you describe there requires write/admin access though.

I'm not religious about this. My team automates anything we have to do more than a couple of times, and from time to time we do have to manually alter something in a prod db. Do it often/long enough though and someone _will_ screw something up.

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