MySQL became "good enough for production use" through a process of redefinition -- lots of people use MySQL in production, so obviously it's good enough for them, right? Seriously though, it has improved, a lot, over the years, but there are still places where not only does it do something stupid and harmful, but it doesn't even consider it important enough to tell you that it happened. You've found one of those. Hopefully the "strict mode" business eliminates most of those problems, but you know as well as I that the people who need it most won't use it at all. :|