Back in the 90s I remember a work colleague asking 'can you rollback a drop table?', to which I replied 'no', and all the blood drained from his face in seconds. It's one of those things you've heard happens to people, but until you see it, you can't quite believe it.
>_< , something similar happened to me when I did an rm -Rf * in the old pictures directory on my system ... Well ... It wasn't the old pictures directory, it was the backup directory with all pictures from my older phone !! To say that blood drained from my face would be an understatement, thankfully I was able to recover most of it.
The first thing I did after the recovery marathon was to alias rm so that it instead works by moving stuff to /tmp
Since this seems to be such a common occurrence, why haven't databases evolved to maintain some limited form of history that can be rolled back? Have no idea of the complexity, so forgive me if that sounds daft.
Long story short, you’re holding multiple transactions open. That’s a lot of bookkeeping overhead if there’s a lot of changes. A system with a few million rows and moderate load on a reasonably-sized server for that load will slam to a halt.
Then come the “site is down and the world is ending” tickets, messages, emails, and phone calls.
