Strict mode is a mode where at least one of STRICT_TRANS_TABLES or STRICT_ALL_TABLES is enabled.

Enabling strict mode can increase data integrity. How? In a nutshell, when strict mode validates inputed and reports errors for invalid data and does not allow the invalid data to be written to the database.

Examples of invalid data that can be handled by strict mode:

1) If you try to insert a 50-character value into 40-character field, in non-strict mode the excess characters will be truncated and the insert will succeed. With strict mode, MySQL returns an error and the insert fails.

2) The date field in mysql is internally stored as a string, which means that invalid dates can be inserted in non-strict mode, and you will see errors only when you try to render the data. With strict mode, again, MySQL returns an error and the insert fails.

The above are examples for just two data types. There are may be several other conditions associated with each data type.

For more detailed and technical information about enabling strict mode in MySQL, read the page on SQL Modes in the MySQL website.

We’re about ready to launch our new, significantly revamped Developer site to the world. If you blink tomorrow night (or refresh your browser) and all of a sudden things look a lot different, you’re not going crazy. It will be different!

In addition to the snazzy visual changes, we’ll be implementing some functional ones as well. You’ll be able to rate each item as helpful or unhelpful, and will be able to view and submit user-contributed comments (a la php.net). You will be able to browse items by “recent additions”, “most popular” and “most viewed” along with category, version and edition. You will be able to quickly share articles using several types of social network links such as Facebook, Google bookmarks, Digg, and many more.

The target date for the new site is the evening of Wednesday, July 30th.

We hope you like the new look of the site, and as always, we welcome your comments. A big thank you to our website developer Lam for all of his hard work!

An extremely fast database is a key comonpent to a successful SugarCRM implementation.  MySQL lead architect Brian Aker has announced the Drizzle project which will redesign the MySQL core to be based on a modular architecture.  The upside of this redesign will be the ability to install a MySQL-based db without unneeded functionality that slows down the db engine.  Hence a smaller db engine designed for Web-based apps.

Some of the functionality that won’t be in the core engine are listed in the project FAQ.

No modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, ACL. Fewer data types.  Less engines, less code. Assume the primary engine is transactional.

It appears Drizzle is a separate project and product with many MySQL engineers working on it but not being directly run by Sun/MySQL.  It would be interesting to see how much of this work will factor back into the core MySQL distribution over time.  Either way, it seems there is certainly a market for lean and mean db’s targeted exclusively at Web-based apps.