Or good old , warp to planet , drop can , all that good stuff <| sep |> That ' s not necessarily the case here . It ' s all SQL , so the following is plausibleImagine a table comments with rows that look roughly like this id user text created edited 42 bob I like cats 20161124 noUsers have the ability to make edits , which would change the value of text . Elsewhere in the site code or the database , there would be some trigger function that looks something like On updating text in table comments , set editedyes . id user text created edited 42 bob edited post 20161124 yesOrdinarily , all updates would go through the userfacing API , triggering the edited function . But there ' s no reason why someone with internal access couldn ' t trivially do one of the following if the trigger is outside the database proper , instead in the API layer Issue the UPDATE command to the database directly . The text field gets changed and that ' s that . if the trigger is a formally defined trigger internal to the database Manually override the trigger yourself before issuing the UPDATE . This can be done with slightly more effort . Alternatively , just make the edit normally , without bypassing the trigger , but then issue a separate UPDATE that just unsets the edited flag . This is an acceptable poorman ' s approach to fabricating the database without special setup , because there ' s probably no audit triggers on commands fiddling with the edited flag directly , since no code would ever really do that .