I have had such fun reading posts on this site.So, I give a bit of the joy back. I have inherited swathes of code from my predecessor. It all works, but you have to look at it with a real big squint to understand what is going on half of the time. This snippet is the best I have come accross to date...

You're not really winning anything by doing it that way and you're making your application much more complex. Situations with "forgotten" WHERE clauses come up when entering ad-hoc queries, not in (most) applications' queries. Furthermore, forgetting the WHERE clause on "UPDATE foo SET is_deleted = 1...