The absolutely worst thing about MySQL is its lack of strictness. Maybe this has changed, but I was furious when I, by accident, inserted latin1 data into an UT

The absolutely worst thing about MySQL is its lack of strictness. Maybe this has changed, but I was furious when I, by accident, inserted latin1 data into an UTF-8 table. Instead of complaining about invalid input data, MySQL accepted the data and truncated it at the first invalid byte. Without error or warning. Even if this was due to a misconfiguration on my part, behavior like this is completely unacceptable. http://www.gnegg.ch/2008/02/failing-silently-is-bad/ http://www.gnegg.ch/2008/02/failing-silently-is-bad/ and don't get me started on other comparable issues like truncating overlong texts added to varchar fields, or accepting invalid dates and silently converting them to 0000-00-00 shudder