Transactions and rollback is the dry run. The problem is that if you keep the transaction open for too long, you will block other updates to the same data.
Yep, I always write any update queries as a rollback transaction with some selects inside it to verify what the data looks like after it's done now, before I switch it to commit. I primarily use Microsoft SQL Server right now, so I also use WITH (NOLOCK) to prevent issues running my query will have with other updates.
