When I first started working in the computer world delete was a simple thing. You typed "del myfirstprogram.basic" and it was gone. Later in the DOS world, there was a warning, but most people were so used to just hitting Enter twice, it didn't slow us down much. Even the confirmation dialogs in Windows rarely served to slow someone down and many people, probably me most of all, ended up getting rid of files they needed.

The recycle bin in Windows 95 really helped many of us protect ourselves from working too quickly. Even today I rarely empty my recycle bin, using it periodically to recover something that I didn't mean to delete yesterday.

Buck Woody, working at Microsoft on the management tools we use, recently posted a blog entry about "" and is looking for feedback. Personally I think deleting a database is a serious deal and we shouldn't make it easy. There should be some delay to give you a few extra seconds to be sure that this is the database you mean to delete and it's not one with a similar name.

I'm not sure how to best implement this. I think most people that are comfortable with the tools will always know the steps to take and perform the actions through muscle memory, not necessarily paying attention to the individual steps. While I think people are fairly careful when it comes to performing actions such as deleting a database, mistakes will still happen.

I'm not even sure a two phase commit, requiring two people to put in passwords or authenticate the action would work. We could implement some type of military, repeat the orders back, and require two virtual "key turns" by two separate people. Just like in the movie Crimson Tide, but I'm sure that wouldn't work in today's IT world.

The person confirming would be too busy and just believe you were doing the right thing.

If you have some thoughts, please let Buck know and maybe they'll come up with some interesting way to implement this in the future. Maybe we'll all get encoded CAPTCHAs to delete all objects. Wouldn't that be fun?

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA

Today's podcast features music by Wakamojo, the Kansas band featuring our very own Adam Angelini, DBA from the heartland and SQLServerCentral.com community member.

The podcast feeds are now available at sqlservercentral.podshow.com to get better bandwidth and maybe a little more exposure :). Comments are definitely appreciated and wanted. You can get feeds from there.

• Video Podcast - MB, Quicktime
• Video Podcast - MB, WMV
• Audio Podcast - MB, MP3

Someone called me the "Voice of the DBA" awhile back and I liked it. So that's what I've named the show. If you like it, tell the boss!