Don't feel too bad about it as I'm sure most of us have done that at least once. I know I have.

Yeah, I read somewhere that a typist makes an error on average about 360 characters. Surely the same must be the case for DB operations...

I've mucked up bad a few times but nothing that was ever permanent, but took time to remedy.

Yup- just a friendly reminder to everyone of the importance of timely backups. And especially backups that you can actually restore.

rm -Rf *

Done as root at the top of my webserver.

shutdown -h now

Shutting down my desktop from a terminal. Except the PC didn't shutdown. Stared stupidly as I realized...crap. I just remotely shut down my webserver. Two fixes to that. First, I thankfully had a KVM IP switch on my webserver so I cycled the power and restarted it IIRC. Secondly, put everything except the PC (screen, printer, etc) on it's own power bar and now I just hit the power bar at the end of the night - turns off everything except the box.

Usually when I'm about to do an UPDATE or DELETE I first write it as a SELECT statement and verify that only the rows I'm about to delete or UPDATE are selected.

Usually when I'm about to do an UPDATE or DELETE I first write it as a SELECT statement and verify that only the rows I'm about to delete or UPDATE are selected.

Same here -- it's a good habit to get into.

Yup- I usually do that too. The one time I don't do it...

luckily i don't use the console i use MySQL workbench to do DB stuff and it won't allow a DELETE without a where clause, it gives an error. not for update though

Don't feel bad, just last week I was trying to clean up double spaces and in the replace forgot to put a single space to replace it with and it wiped all the spaces from our product names... Lol.. yea thank goodness for backups.