You’re in production. The change is “simple”. A small UPDATE or DELETE with a WHERE clause you’ve read over multiple times.

Still, right before hitting enter, there’s that pause.

Not because you don’t know SQL. Not because you didn’t think it through. But because you know: •If this goes wrong, it’s on you •Rollback isn’t always clean or instant •And the safest option is often… “don’t touch it”

In reality, I’ve seen people deal with this by: •Manually backing up data “just in case” •Having someone else stare at the query with them •Restricting who’s allowed to run anything at all •Or simply avoiding fixing things directly in prod

I’m not asking for best practices or tooling advice.

I’m genuinely curious:

What do you personally do, when you have to change data and can’t be 100% sure it’s harmless?

Is this just an unavoidable part of working with production databases?