> ASAIK the purpose of a dry-run is to understand what will happen, not to test what will happen. For the latter we have testing.

Not really. Testing is a way to increase confidence that code does what it is specified to do, because it is cheaper than full-blown formal analysis :)

The problem raised by OP here is granularity. Operation like `update(record, field, value)` is itself a tree of smaller sub-operations that may do some permissions checking, locking, network calls, even checking for presence of record if it has upsert semantics, all of which could fail. A dry run with a plan that is too coarse can succeed while the actual operation fails over things left unchecked.