It is certainly true that most users of relational databases before MySQL used them for applications where throwing away data is a potential catastrophe, and mo

It is certainly true that most users of relational databases before MySQL used them for applications where throwing away data is a potential catastrophe, and most uses of MySQL were for toy applications where if that happened no big deal. It was about a decade before MySQL even supported transactions. atoi is deficient by modern standards, but at least it clearly documents what the behavior is and always has. It doesn't truncate anything. For a database, truncating data is unforgivable. That is what errors are for, so your database doesn't act as a black hole where your data may silently disappear forever. And yes, if you can't return an error for some reason, you should preserve as much data as possible. Throwing away hundreds or thousands of characters after an initial anomaly is insane. But a database should never do that anyway, it should either store what you give it, or return an error. Same with a filesystem or any other trustworthy means of data storage. Sorry we were too lazy to tell you we threw your data away isn't acceptable, nor is relying on anyone to check for warnings that should be hard errors.