But I’m not core Magento developer for almost half a year now, freelancing with Magento projects.

I’m going to ramble a bit now, mostly due to sleepless night and lots of coffee, feel free to skip it

I do understand what you’re saying and can’t say I disagree with your feelings, but what I can say is, unfortunately we’re living in a sparce world, where resources are limited and there’s a need to make decisions over the most efficient use of available resources.

Our decisions are based on priorities and everybody has different set of priorities based on their personal history, skill set, interests, position in society, specific situation, etc. It is virtually impossible to get into someone else’s shoes.

Not going to far, developers’ priorities are different from users’, managers’ priorities are different from developers’, etc.

So what I’m getting to is, while you strongly prioritize some things, you have to accept that others might see different things more important and urgent to implement, sacrificing your priorities, and that’s perfectly legal as long as the decision is made over their domain, because in the end we have to take care of ourselves (survive, stay afloat, etc.), so other can benefit from our contributions to the world.

Trying to adhere to priorities of other people instead of making your own decisions may and will destroy your life, I hope you can agree with me here.

I can assure you that Magento team do not rest on laurels, work very hard, and use the best of their skills and abilities to bring Magento even further.

Your logic is spot on … I truly appreciate and value your feedback and participation – however …

• It didn’t exactly slip their mind, considering it has been heavily discussed for roughly 435 days on the Magento Forums: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/1680/ … (although you personally weighed in roughly 50 weeks ago)
• One of the beauties of Magento is that you don’t necessarily need to be a web developer or hire a web development firm to use it. A web-savvy non-programmer could easily download, deploy, customize and launch an e-commerce store … until they try to delete an order!
• With Magento updates being as volatile as they are (not to mention basic development / implementing plugins), significant testing (especially in ‘checkout’) is required often. Options are to have a development environment (not exactly a turn-key task, although I am quite impressed by mine) or to do final testing in production and roll-back
• It isn’t even cleaning the whole database. It’s the simple functionality of deleting a single order
• And finally … cleaning the database / deleting an order is just the ‘Skim Milk’ on the ‘Grocery List’ of headaches I’ve experienced over my tenure with Magento. Fortunately, the list of “HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT!?!?” is just as long

When you’re used to build websites for other people, they rely on you to do all the technical stuff for them, they don’t ask you to give them user-friendly control over all aspects of their database. So you build the site, they test and happy, ask you to deploy the application and clean db to their production server, and that’s it – they won’t ever need the functionality of cleaning up database from their admin interface, so there’s none.

I’m sure that over time Magento will get all the functionality there’s a demand for, either through core functionality or extensions.

You are absolutely right that the SQL could be simplified …

However, the case still stands – even if it is a single line – you should not need to run an unofficial SQL script against your database to clean up test orders. Most other systems (including OS Commerce) includes a neat little button in the administrative area that allows you to do this. A non-technical user could get a Magento store up and running with no problems. They shouldn’t be forced to access their raw database and run SQL statements in order to perform such basic tasks.

The wider net is around the fundamental issue: why *aren’t* these boxed functionalities in Magento, when it does so many other more advanced things without a hitch?

TRUNCATE `catalogsearch_result`;

TRUNCATE `customer_entity`;
TRUNCATE `report_event`;
TRUNCATE `sales_flat_quote`;
TRUNCATE `sales_order`;
TRUNCATE `tag`;
TRUNCATE `wishlist`;
TRUNCATE `catalogsearch_query`;
TRUNCATE `catalogsearch_result`;
TRUNCATE `sendfriend_log`;
TRUNCATE `log_customer`;
TRUNCATE `log_visitor`;
TRUNCATE `log_visitor_info`;
TRUNCATE `log_quote`;

I do not think this is overly excessive for complete test db cleanup

What would it be for oscommerce?