Great point Bruce, I hadn't really thought of the semi-colon as a safety mechanism, but I guess it is.
Jeremy -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Bruce Momjian Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 1:27 PM To: Yuji Shinozaki Cc: Dave Ewart; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ADMIN] "DELETE FROM" protection Yuji Shinozaki wrote: > > I've gotten myself into the habit of always writing out a > > SELECT ... FROM ... WHERE ...; > > first, and then command-line editing it to > > DELETE FROM ... WHERE ...; > > Putting it in a transaction (BEGIN, COMMIT or ROLLBACK) is probably the > best practice. I used to do this with Informix before a DELETE: > SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ... WHERE ...; ^^^^^^^^ and Informix had that "Are your sure" check in dbaccess too, but after I did the COUNT(*), the prompt was just annoying. Also, what interfaces allow you to just press ENTER to send a command? With psql, you have to terminate it with a semicolon or nothing happens. I think there is justification for an "Are you sure" only if a single keystroke sends the command. -- Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us [EMAIL PROTECTED] | (610) 359-1001 + If your life is a hard drive, | 13 Roberts Road + Christ can be your backup. | Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
