Today I was having a fun discussion about MySQL. A number of people were pointing how how bad MySQL is (one Anti-MS person said “It's worse than anything MS has made.”). One of the big problems with MySQL is how it handles datatypes. It doesn't. Pass it invalid data, and it silently “fixes” it (read corrupts) so that it works in whatever column you specified. This allows people to pass whatever they want as a date, for instance.

Now, those reading who've done any real work with DBs and applications are probably saying “uh oh” right now. If I declare something as int NOT NULL, I mean it. Don't take NULL and magically conver it into 0 or empty string. Don't turn my varchar into a DateTime of 0000-0-0. If I do a query that has invalid data, *something is wrong*. Throw an error. Let the developer know.

This went back and forth for a while, until someone responded angrily and said “You: I want errors. Me: F* you, I want it to work.” This is exactly like some VB developers are thinking when they do “On Error Resume Next”. What do you think? Should a DB work like VB and “On Error Resume Next”?

I say, lets take this one step further! Why should the filesystem give us errors? “rm -rf something”? Something isn't found? Well, just use the next item found, alphabetical order. That way, we can “just work” instead of giving back nasty error messages. Sigh.