Blast Radius Protection & Shields — CATable Documentation

Zero Accidental Disasters

A single missing WHERE clause in an UPDATE or DELETE statement can take down an entire production system. CATable solves this with the industry-first Blast Radius Protection Shield.

How Blast Radius Protection Works:

AST Static Query Analysis: Before executing any query on a connection flagged as Production, CATable parses the SQL Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).
Danger Detection: Identifies high-risk conditions:
- DELETE or UPDATE statements without any WHERE clause.
- Operations without an active transaction block.
- Destructive DDL statements: DROP TABLE, TRUNCATE, DROP DATABASE, ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN.
Dry-Run Execution in Rollback Transaction: If enabled, CATable starts a pre-flight transaction, runs EXPLAIN or an isolated dry-run, reads the number of affected rows, and immediately rolls back:
```
BEGIN;
-- Pre-flight evaluation
EXPLAIN ANALYZE DELETE FROM orders WHERE status = 'expired';
ROLLBACK;
```
Impact Confirmation Modal: The user is shown an explicit confirmation dialog displaying:
- Target Database & Host
- Calculated Affected Row Count (e.g. "Warning: This will alter 1,248,390 rows!")
- Time required to execute

Security Guarantee: The Blast Radius Shield runs locally on your machine. You can enforce read-only connection locks so that write statements are rejected before even hitting the network socket.