>Hi,
>
>>A gun has a safety switch so it doesn't go off accidentally. But the safety can always be switched off. If you're being threatened by someone with a gun, how would you feel if the gun refused to fire?
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>In this instance I'd be the gun-maker. There are some people I wouldn't let near the gun itself - let alone get their fingers on the safety catch <g>
>
>>The count option with a warning is fine because it gives the user the information to make a decision. That's much better than refusing to do it. Who are we to judge what's an appropriate number of records? How about when there's only 50 records in the database. If your rule is NEVER let the user select all records, what's the harm in picking 50 records?
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>My rule was not 'Never allow the user to select all records' - just 'Set a reasonable maximum to the number of records that the user can select'.
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>>Any person should be able to do what they need to do and I'm not going to FORCE them not to do it. I'll provide them with the tools to do it better. They should get warned, with the option to continue or not. They should have the tool to specify whatever criteria they want. The should have the ability to cancel the query in midstream.
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>>They can decide to pull the 16 million in the evening, over the weekend, whatever. They can decide to go back to the boss and say, it's going to take days to run that. So the boss can escalate the request to IT.
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>Would you apply this argument to a web app with annonymous users? If I did it I'd probably be out of a job long before they got the result set <s>

Funny, Google lets anyone pull a query on just about anything. A query for the single letter A returns 8,790,000,000 hits. If the user wants to scroll through all of those records, it lets them.

It's our job to support the users with enabling technology. Google does this with pagination, but it REFUSES to search.

>
>>Backups take hours. Should the backup software REFUSE to run?
>Backups are different argument. They can run in the background, at a lower priority, be scheduled for low usage periods and don't neccessarily affect network bandwidth.
>
Actually, they are not a different argument. It's a piece of software running in a particular environment. It's often required to backup all files across the entire network. The backup programmers don't build in code that says if the backup operator (user) wants to run the backup at 3 in the afternoon REFUSE to do it.