Re: Disruptive corruption of data during an update

On 29 March 2012 16:47, Ennio-Sr <nasr(dot)laili(at)tin(dot)it> wrote:
> --------
> mydb=> update bibl set argomento='curatori', autore='DELLA VOLPE Galvano \
>       (con due capitoli aggiunti e note di)  where n_prog=3285;
> mydb'> ';
>
> UPDATE 12845
> mydb=>
> --------
>
> Having an adequate back-up I think I'll be able to recover the data, but
> can someone explain what the hell happened?

Because of the single quote being at the wrong place, your query was
processed as though not having a where clause at all, and the ENTIRE
table got updated with the text:

DELLA VOLPE Galvano \
      (con due capitoli aggiunti e note di)  where n_prog=3285;

in the autore field (and similarly in the argomento field).

What I typically do is to attach "where 1 = 0" to inhibit a query from
making any changes, if I find an error in a multiline query and do not
want to Control-C out of psql.

Binand