#0 should be: for anything other than DDL, run in a transaction. Immediately after executing, do sanity checks on data that you know should have been touched, and data you know shouldn’t have been touched. Ideally, you’re pair programming and your partner is the one doing those tests. Then you can rollback if you accidentally forgot a WHERE clause and destructively updated more than expected. Of course, every second you keep a transaction open contributes to bloat, so don’t be slow. But this has saved me countless times.