Nothing in my comment implies anything close to thinking that there are databases that are don't or flawless or don't corrupt data. I'm not sure how a comment a

Nothing in my comment implies anything close to thinking that there are databases that are don't or flawless or don't corrupt data. I'm not sure how a comment about poor query optimization could possibly be interpreted that way. Regardless, MySQL by default silently eats data in common situations (truncation of VARCHAR) and returns flat-out incorrect results due to PHP-style "helpful" coercions (SELECT 0 == "banana"). It implements UTF-8 incorrectly, but fixing it would break existing apps, so we're forever stuck with "utf8" encoding that isn't. There are a million more of these, and while some of them have workarounds (strict tables, utf8mb4), many of them don't (automatic coercion, boneheaded query planner, creating implicit temporary tables without indexes even when present, etc.). A comparison of MySQL to PHP is apt, honestly. The fact that PHP is a blight doesn't mean other languages don't have their own problems. But PHP (like MySQL) is in a league of its own here.