If you have your website on one server for testing/development (like this laptop) and your live site on another, it's quite likely that once in a while your database.php file from one or the other will find itself referring to the wrong database. Over at With Cake a solution was proposed to allow you to switch database sources in the app model, however it might be easier to manage by switching at the source of the 'problem'.

With a modification to your database.php file like so:

If, like on this site, you have some demo applications with some data in them, it's wise to try to ensure that the test data you spent an hour or two creating doesn't get deleted.

For the demos that were on this site (they'll be coming back after some tweaking) I set up a script to run once per hour to truncate and reimport the test data - thus ensuring that malicious data, should there be any, is removed and there is always some data to play with.

More than likely, most users who would visit a site with a demonstration aren´t going to click a link marked "delete" unless they want to check it works. There are a group of site users however who will click all of your delete links thus leaving subsequent visitors with no data to play with.