safe mode

While using MySQL Workbench, we tried to execute an UPDATE command that did not use the Key of the table in the WHERE clause. In our case, it did not matter and it was expected to perform that update without that restriction.

When we tried to execute the code though, we got the following error:

Error Code: 1175. You are using safe update mode and you tried to update a table without a WHERE that uses a KEY column

and the following solution from Workbench:

To disable safe mode, toggle the option in Preferences -> SQL Editor and reconnect.

We did not want to close the session for many reasons (we had data in other tabs, we would lose the undo history, we would have to revert the change later on, etc.).

To solve this issue without reconnecting nor changing the configuration of the tool, we appended the following code above the update statement and executed both lines together (we selected the two commands and pressed CTRL+Shift+Enter):

SET SQL_SAFE_UPDATES = 0;

This line of code, instructed the tool to ignore Error 1175 and allowed us to complete our task.