It would be nice if there was a psql option that would warn you if you're about to do any kind of update, delete or insert without doing a BEGIN;

(You could always set autocommit=false, which forces you to explicitly commit or rollback every action, but that has its own baggage)

UPDATEs should require a WHERE clause too.

At which point we could just say all SQL should have a WHERE clause.

You're probably thinking of the --safe-updates option [1] for the `mysql` CLI, also available as the memorable alias --i-am-a-dummy. This requires UPDATE and DELETE to have either a WHERE clause or a LIMIT clause. Under the hood, the command-line client option just manipulates the sql_safe_updates session variable [2] to enforce the UPDATE and DELETE requirement, as well as a couple other unrelated variables to prevent overly-huge SELECTs.

It's not enabled by default out of the box, but some companies do override their configuration to enable it for new sessions, iirc Facebook did this.

[1] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/mysql-tips.html#safe...

[2] https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/server-system-variab...

That just wouldn’t fly where you have business customers, many insist on data deletion at the end of contracts. In practice though partitioning or using seperate databases can be a better strategy for dealing with that as otherwise dealing with backups are challenging.

It might depend on the version, but last time I checked, DELETEing an entire table was much slower than TRUNCATE TABLE.