Re: DDL Damage Assessment

On 10/2/14, 2:43 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> >Questions:
>> >
>> > 1. Do you agree that a systematic way to report what a DDL command (or
>> > script, or transaction) is going to do on your production database
>> > is a feature we should provide to our growing user base?
> Yes.
+1
>> > 2. What do you think such a feature should look like?
> As with others, I think EXPLAIN is a good way to do this without adding
> a keyword. So you'd do:
>
> EXPLAIN
> ALTER TABLE ....
I'm thinking it would be better to have something you could set at a session level, so you don't have to stick EXPLAIN in front of all your DDL.

As for the dry-run idea, I don't think that's really necessary. I've never seen anyone serious that doesn't have a development environment, which is where you would simply deploy the real DDL using "verbose" mode and see what the underlying commands actually do.