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POSQL With A Safety Net
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  1. POSQL With A Safety Net
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    copied!<p>My firm have a talented and smart operations staff who are working very hard. I'd like to give them a SQL-execution tool that helps them avoid common, easily-detected SQL mistakes that are easy to make when they are in a hurry. Can anyone suggest such a tool? Details follow.</p> <p>Part of the operations team remit is writing very complex ad-hoc SQL queries. Not surprisingly, operators sometimes make mistakes in the queries they write because they are so busy. </p> <p>Luckily, their queries are all SELECTs not data-changing SQL, and they are running on a copy of the database anyway. Still, we'd like to prevent errors in the SQL they run. For instance, sometimes the mistakes lead to long-running queries that slow down the duplicate system they're using and inconvenience others until we find the culprit query and kill it. Worse, occasionally the mistakes lead to apparently-correct answers that we don't catch until much later, with consequent embarrassment. </p> <p>Our developers also make mistakes in complex code that they write, but they have Eclipse and various plugins (such as <a href="http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" title="FindBugs">FindBugs</a>) that catch errors as they type. I'd like to give operators something similar - ideally it would see</p> <pre><code>SELECT U.NAME, C.NAME FROM USER U, COMPANY C WHERE U.NAME = 'ibell'; </code></pre> <p>and before you executed, it would say "Hey, did you realise that's a Cartesian product? Are you sure you want to do that?" It doesn't have to be very smart - finding obviously missing join conditions and similar evident errors would be fine.</p> <p>It looks like <a href="http://www.toadsoft.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer" title="TOAD">TOAD</a> should do this but I can't seem to find anything about such a feature. Are there other tools like TOAD that can provide this kind of semi-intelligent error correction?</p> <p>Update: I forgot to mention that we're using MySQL.</p>
 

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