5 ms·

Back in the 90s I remember a work colleague asking 'can you rollback a drop table?', to which I replied 'no', and all the blood drained from his face in seconds

Back in the 90s I remember a work colleague asking 'can you rollback a drop table?', to which I replied 'no', and all the blood drained from his face in seconds. It's one of those things you've heard happens to people, but until you see it, you can't quite believe it.

jdsalaro 3y ago
> can you rollback a drop table >_< , something similar happened to me when I did an rm -Rf * in the old pictures directory on my system ... Well ... It wasn't the old pictures directory, it was the backup directory with all pictures from my older phone !! To say that blood drained from my face would be an understatement, thankfully I was able to recover most of it. The first thing I did after the recovery marathon was to alias rm so that it instead works by moving stuff to /tmp
- euroderf 3y ago
  My boss was doing housecleaning in his PDP-11 (Unix v.6) account and did a "rm *" in the bin directory but OOPS it was the system bin.
- eCa 3y ago
  In the late 90’s I wanted to try this Linux thing, so I followed a tutorial. First step: fdisk Yes, that was my Windows partition going bye-bye.
  - CoastalCoder 3y ago
    So... success? ;)
    - xp84 3y ago
      I mean, he arguably did F the Disk, sounds correct
    - jdsalaro 3y ago
      :D task failed successfully !
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- noAnswer 3y ago
  inb4: /tmp partition gets full. Causing things to brake. :-)
  - kubanczyk 3y ago
    No problem, just use rm ;)
msravi 3y ago
Since this seems to be such a common occurrence, why haven't databases evolved to maintain some limited form of history that can be rolled back? Have no idea of the complexity, so forgive me if that sounds daft.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kayodelycaon 3y ago
  Long story short, you’re holding multiple transactions open. That’s a lot of bookkeeping overhead if there’s a lot of changes. A system with a few million rows and moderate load on a reasonably-sized server for that load will slam to a halt. Then come the “site is down and the world is ending” tickets, messages, emails, and phone calls.

jdsalaro 3y ago

> can you rollback a drop table >_< , something similar happened to me when I did an rm -Rf * in the old pictures directory on my system ... Well ... It wasn't the old pictures directory, it was the backup directory with all pictures from my older phone !! To say that blood drained from my face would be an understatement, thankfully I was able to recover most of it. The first thing I did after the recovery marathon was to alias rm so that it instead works by moving stuff to /tmp

euroderf 3y ago
My boss was doing housecleaning in his PDP-11 (Unix v.6) account and did a "rm *" in the bin directory but OOPS it was the system bin.
eCa 3y ago
In the late 90’s I wanted to try this Linux thing, so I followed a tutorial. First step: fdisk Yes, that was my Windows partition going bye-bye.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  So... success? ;)
  - xp84 3y ago
    I mean, he arguably did F the Disk, sounds correct
  - jdsalaro 3y ago
    :D task failed successfully !
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
noAnswer 3y ago
inb4: /tmp partition gets full. Causing things to brake. :-)
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  No problem, just use rm ;)

msravi 3y ago

Since this seems to be such a common occurrence, why haven't databases evolved to maintain some limited form of history that can be rolled back? Have no idea of the complexity, so forgive me if that sounds daft.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kayodelycaon 3y ago
Long story short, you’re holding multiple transactions open. That’s a lot of bookkeeping overhead if there’s a lot of changes. A system with a few million rows and moderate load on a reasonably-sized server for that load will slam to a halt. Then come the “site is down and the world is ending” tickets, messages, emails, and phone calls.