A momentary lapse of reason

Mistakes may happen and safeguards against human errors are always a good thing, even if they may seem annoying.

Back in 2002 a sysadmin posted on Usenet the story of a clueless user which by mistake dropped a vital table in the database. The story is part of a series known as Tales from the machine room and still available here (in Italian).

Let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong in dropping stuff, if we drop the stuff that should be dropped. Otherwise we will get a one way ticket to a lot of trouble.

This post will cover the new feature DROP DATABASE WITH (FORCE); that will appear in PostgreSQL 13. We we’ll see the current behaviour, the implicit dangers of this option and why it’s a good idea to do not use it at all.

picture: The hole, copyright Federico Campoli