Production Database Deletions

Cluster focuses on anecdotes and discussions about engineers accidentally deleting, truncating, or corrupting production databases due to mistakes like wrong environments, missing backups, or direct prod access. Comments reference real incidents like GitLab's DB loss and emphasize prevention strategies.

📉 Falling 0.4x Databases
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Keywords

CUSTOMERS github.blog AWS theregister.com INEVITABLE UTF8 AI SQL HN ycombinator.com db database production accidentally data prod query table backups mysql

Sample Comments

hertzrat Mar 19, 2021 View on HN

Oversights happenhttps://thenewstack.io/junior-dev-deleted-production-databas...

jnsaff2 Jun 10, 2024 View on HN

This is how I felt when a Gitlab employee deleted the production database by doing it in the wrong terminal window.

apavlo Aug 13, 2025 View on HN

Dude fix your DBMS implementation before you start losing people's data. Or switch to something vetted like SQLite.

ndiscussion Jul 10, 2018 View on HN

Dropping a production DB would generally be an accident - this seems more like poor judgment.

nighthawk Feb 27, 2013 View on HN

the monumental fuck up was cancelling mysql backup and having all engineers work directly with the production database, what you did was INEVITABLE..

jensvdh Nov 28, 2019 View on HN

Like when they dropped their database and took a few days to recover?

westmeal Oct 4, 2017 View on HN

This reminds me of the story about the intern that wiped the DB with a single command except it's worse.

JamieeeT Jul 23, 2014 View on HN

Aaaand you killed their database.

f00barbaz12345 Nov 2, 2018 View on HN

Early in my career (software engineer) I was debugging an issue in our application that was causing some funky data to be written to the DB (turned out to be double encoding of UTF8 strings). While validating the issue locally, I decided the best course of action was to drop the table and recreate it. I did just that, except I still saw the issue. Well, turns out that I was connected to not to my local DB, but instead the production DB.My manager was very understanding, and walked me through

richardknop Oct 17, 2018 View on HN

My bet is data loss. Some engineer deleted MySQL table accidentally and they found out their backups are not working.