banDeleteWithoutWhere¶

Group destructive · Recommended · Since 0.25.0
Diagnostic lint/banDeleteWithoutWhere · Postgres error WHERE

Sources: inspired by pgfence/delete-without-where

Description¶

A DELETE statement without a WHERE clause will remove all rows from the table.

This is almost always unintentional in a migration or application context. If you truly need to remove all rows, use TRUNCATE explicitly (and acknowledge its implications), or add a WHERE true to signal intent.

Examples¶

Invalid¶

delete from my_table;

code-block.sql:1:1 lint/banDeleteWithoutWhere ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

  ! A DELETE without a WHERE clause will remove all rows from the table.

  > 1 │ delete from my_table;
      │ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    2 │ 

  i Add a WHERE clause to limit which rows are deleted.

Valid¶

delete from my_table where expired_at < now();

How to configure¶

{
  "linter": {
    "rules": {
      "banDeleteWithoutWhere": "error"
    }
  }
}

How to suppress¶

Suppress this diagnostic with a comment:

-- pgls-ignore banDeleteWithoutWhere