Or when you are developing code that uses a SQL delete and you run the page and it takes WAY longer then it should. Then you really wish you had setup a development SQL server intead of testing the code on the production database.

Rule #1 for dumping queries with debugging purposes... use TOP attribute.

I learned this lesson when debugging reports :)

So what.. It is your development server and you are the ONLY one on it!

Ah, the old Cartesian product. Don't you just love it?

Or when you forget the WHERE clause in DELETE * from....

I usually try to run the queries in a query analyzer before running them in CF... isql has a stop button that comes in rather handy sometimes. :)

updating an advertiser's phone number without the 'where' clause on a very popular classified site... thats one hot number for the evening...

my favorite SQL tip for testing queries is to surround all SQL within a transaction in query analyzer.
EX:

BEGIN TRAN

DELETE....

SELECT.... (this to see that my previous delete did what I thought it should)

ROLLBACK TRAN

Once I am happy with the results I can just change the ROLLBACK TRAN to a COMMIT TRAN.

@Tom K,

LOL! yeah that happened to me once on a production system when I was an inexperienced programmer... I Deleted all the orders from the system... then scrambled for the half hour restoring the database (fortunately I had a good back up plan in place and we only lost a few minutes worth of orders). There's a lesson you only want to learn once. Now I always verify any manually written delete statements with a select statement first, then change the "select *" to "Delete" once I'm satisfied I am deleting the right records. Even still I usually feel some "query anxiety" where I flash backs of my 1 and only mistake in that area, and knock on the wood of my desk before I click "execute" =)

i once ran a delete on a really big (data warehouse) table. after a few minutes i thought something was up. then i realized the where clause was incorrect. hit stop and waited for a few more minutes... fortunately the conditions were so off it was only doing a table scan, but nothing got deleted.

Or when you are developing code that uses a SQL , and testing a mail form, and you have 100000 emails in your box!

Back in CF4 days, I did this:

select email from users, agencies

cfmail to:#email# ......

ouch. >50K emails. my bad!

Fortunately I made a SECOND error and accidentally sent all of them to myself....

yeah.