From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 15:54 on 20 Mar 2007 Subject: Re: MySQL Function Naming * Aaron Crane <hateful@xxxxxxxxxx.xx.xx> [2007-03-20 15:15]: > I'm prepared to believe that this is merely a bug in our > particular point-release of the server, rather than a > fundamental design flaw, but that doesn't stop it being > incredibly hateful: if I'm looking for something equal to an > exemplar, then, no, something vaguely similar is _not_ > sufficient. How about where you put a constraint on a column, say it's an INTEGER and you say it must contain only values from 0 to 99, and when you try to insert a row which has 200 as the value for that column, MySQL helpfully truncates the value to 99 and then proceeds to insert the row? Now granted, v5 has finally added a strict mode or whatever it's called, where this kind of constraint violation throws an error instead of silently mangling your data. But IT TOOK THEM FIVE VERSIONS to put that in, AND THEN IT'S STILL NOT THE DEFAULT. Then there's the mindboggling idiocy where NULLs and empty strings are often considered equivalent. I think they've improved on that as well, but good grief, this shouldn't be broken to begin with! Or here, another case that was recently posted on use.Perl: mysql> CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE the_dates (d DATE NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00'); mysql> INSERT INTO the_dates VALUES ('0000-00-00'); mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM the_dates WHERE d IS NOT NULL; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 1 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) Fine so far? OK, here comes the punchline: mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM the_dates WHERE d IS NULL; +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 1 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) *boggle* HOW does anyone conceive of THAT sort of braindamage? I assume your horror story is rooted in the "everything's more or less the same" kind of attitude; just a different symptom of the same underlying problem. You'll find loads of horror stories like that if you dig in even a little. I used to just hate MySQL for being limited and crappy. Since digging in I've also lost all faith that I can entrust my data to its care. I have a few projects running on MySQL because I didn't have the clout to insist against it, but they're now all being moved to Pg post haste. This stuff is... not even wrong. I mean, I'm starting to have trouble even *hating* MySQL anymore. It's like a retard kid that you just can't help kinda pitying. Regards,