I realized tonight exactly why MySQL’s default behavior of silent truncation bothers me.

It reminds me of people who use a ticketing system and close every ticket as soon as they are done working on the issue instead of actually asking the other party if they are satisfied, because closing more tickets make it look like they’re doing more work.

It reminds me of workers at fast food restaurants who hit the button to make the order disappear as if they have already served me my food, because then their throughput times are faster.

Similarly, with MySQL’s default behavior of silent truncation, it’s as if the database server is saying “the fewer database errors raised, the better.” As in the previous two examples, the metrics do not matter if the quality of service is poor — particularly when the quality of service is poor specifically *because* people are trying to meet the metrics instead of the actual goal …

Do you have a master-slave MySQL set up?  Ever do DDL changes on the master?  You may be hit with a serious data integrity bug.  Read on. One of our clients does a regular rename tables on the master to keep the current table small and archive off old data.  We’d occasionally be hit by [...]