I checked each of the recommended/sample .cnf files that come with the Solaris Coolstack 1.1 version of MySQL and, in each case, the “safe-updates” setting is turned off (commented out) by default.

However, what is strange is that one of these sample files has a line above the commented out setting saying, “Only allow UPDATEs and DELETEs that use keys” but all of the others say, “Remove the next comment character if you are not familiar with SQL”.

In any case, enabling this setting was a simple matter of commenting out the “safe-updates” setting the /etc/my.cnf and restarting MySQL.