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Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

Good advice. I also break up the statement so that an incomplete highlight and execute will fail, e.g.

    DELETE FROM   
      Customers WHERE    
      Name='Gude' AND   
      Area='Tama'   
      ;

Much harder to leave off half the clause doing this kind of thing.

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I've forced the habit upon myself to first compose a SELECT statement and verify that it will give me exactly the dataset that I want to run my operation on. Then I wrap that statement into a CTE and run the DELETE / UPDATE on the CTE.

It doesn't save me time, but a lot of nerves.

I'm used to writing the SELECT query and adding the commented-out DELETE just below the SELECT line.

  SELECT *
  -- DELETE
  FROM Sales
  WHERE Customer = 1

Next, selecting the whole query and executing it. If results are satisfactory - selecting only the DELETE part.

This is the one I use too. Tiny difference - I write

   select * -- delete
   from sales
   where customer = 1

so it's even harder to accidentally highlight the 'delete' part.

Although I've switched to DBeaver for a year now, and it automatically pops up a warning when it detects a DELETE query without a WHERE, which is very nice.

DBeaver has something even better, albeit sometimes annoying: you can define a connection as "Production" (highlighted red) and "Test" (green). On Production systems, DBeaver will ask you for confirmation for every write statement.

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