MySQL doesn't care about your data. There are many places where it silently truncates, "helpfully" tries to "do the right thing" and so on. It used to have ver

MySQL doesn't care about your data. There are many places where it silently truncates, "helpfully" tries to "do the right thing" and so on. It used to have very impoverished data types. At least that has been mostly amended, but AFAIK you still can't make an index on a TEXT column without a limit. The "utf8" text type, despite the name, can't hold all of unicode. You need to use utf8mb4. This is merely one example of the general attitude. Another fine example: you can't use mysql_escape_string() in the C API to safely escape strings. Instead, use mysql_real_escape_string(). Instead of hiding the unsafe version, PHP exposes both these functions as-is. PHP and MySQL are truly a match made in hell. The MySQL issue queue is also littered with unaddressed corruption issues which have been open for many years. MariaDB is just a fork, most criticisms to MySQL apply to it as well.