use Perl

I really hope that the MySQL developers have fixed this bug, but since we're not in a position to upgrade right now, it doesn't really matter. Note the foo column in the following table definition:

CREATE TABLE `testaa` (
  `a` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
  `b` double default NULL,
  `foo` enum('this', 'that') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'this',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`a`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

Looks reasonable, yes? Now let's try to insert some bogus data:

mysql> insert into testaa (a, b, foo) values (1, 2.0, '');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

mysql> show warnings;
+---------+------+------------------------------------------+
| Level   | Code | Message                                  |
+---------+------+------------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for column 'foo' at row 1 |
+---------+------+------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> insert into testaa (a, b, foo) values (2, 2.0, 'asdf');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.01 sec)

mysql> show warnings;
+---------+------+------------------------------------------+
| Level   | Code | Message                                  |
+---------+------+------------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for column 'foo' at row 1 |
+---------+------+------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select * from testaa;

+---+------+-----+
| a | b    | foo |
+---+------+-----+
| 1 |    2 |     |
| 2 |    2 |     |
+---+------+-----+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

MySQL's default behavior, in many cases, is to just truncate anything which won't fit into a column. Simply discarding information is so very, very wrong and often leads to corrupt data. As you might guess, this is closely related to a bug I'm trying to hunt down right now :(