I never understood why people use MySQL for anything where correctness is important. The auto-truncaction is only one of many nasty surprises. Did you know tha

I never understood why people use MySQL for anything where correctness is important. The auto-truncaction is only one of many nasty surprises. Did you know that auto-truncation also kicks in if your columns values are small, but you run a CONCAT on them? That was a nasty surprise when a generated a CSV line on DB side, which by bad luck was truncated immediately before a comma, so the result was correst, just the jast few items were missing. And ever looked at the handling of invalid dates? Not to mention what happens if you forgot to specify a column in your GROUP BY clause, but use it in the SELECT part ... To anyone who is so brave to write their application using that database: Be sure you know all those issues and take care of them in your application. Or make sure you aren't affected by them. Or, switch to a high-quality database! I switched to PostgreSQL a long time ago and never looked back. These people care about exactness, quality and clean extensibility in all directions, even user-defined index structures are possible (GIN, GIST). The problem that PostgreSQL was slower than MySQL disappeared as soon as MySQL became transaction safe with InnoDB, because it was now a fair comparison as PostgreSQL was transaction safe from the very beginning. Also, the PostgreSQL project management is one of the best I have ever seen, meeting schedules, regular commit fests, quality-driven, honest beta releases, and so on.