Here's a typical DBA scenario. You're at your desk, working on something, when you get a trouble ticket, phone call, or tap on your shoulder. There's a problem in production and an order, or some other important piece of data, is incorrect. Can you fix it?

Many of us are happy to oblige. Often we know what needs to be changed and can write the INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statement to correct the issue. Even if we have to dig in further, we can usually find the data in a table and determine what should be changed.

However, what do we do then?

If you are asked the make data changes to production, do you QA the script? Do you save the scripts in a VCS or a log? Does anyone else examine the data or code? Do you scan the script yourself, have SQL Server parse it, or bother to look for triggers that might fire? Do you bother to put the script in a transaction with error handling?

I have to say that in most of my career, I didn't bother with any of that. I'd examine a script, perhaps have another DBA or developer look at it, but most of the time I'd run it in production if I thought it was ready. I did often wrap the code in a transaction, with a query to check the results, and an immediate rollback to prevent blocking. However if I thought the results looked good, I'd rerun the query without the transaction. Most of the time that worked well. A few triggers and fat fingers caused issues that I had to fix again, sometimes after quite a bit of work to correct my mistakes.

It's hard to prevent data change errors, especially if it's something we do often, or we work in a small environment with limited staff. Ultimately, we might not even care because if we update the data incorrectly, we can run another update to fix the new issue. That's not necessarily what most managers would want to hear, but it's reality.

The one thing I have insisted upon in my environments was logging any queries run. A simple cut and paste with a timestamp. That way if things were done incorrectly, at least I know what was done.