What are the design/developing process errors cause data loss?

Question

Recently I saw an application recording important data on disk without forcing fsync.

I used to write various applications without testing. I lost a few blog posts by the lack of a WHERE clause in the UPDATE.

Are there any statistics about the data loss by programmers mistakes ? What are the issues that could cause loss of data you see most often?

For fun: http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1016320617/mongodb-is-web-scale#

http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/1085685966/mysql-is-not-acid-compliant

Answer 1

Are there any statistics about the data loss by programmers mistakes ?

I think this is something that would be completely impossible to measure. How do you define data loss? What is it measured in - bits, bytes, rows, pages, disks? How do you know for sure that it was caused by programmer error? It would take an hour to analyse every case from a million possible examples.