Good point. I make sure I specify the columns all the time because I have been caught out by this before.

I had a quick check through the MySQL docs and I noticed for versions > 3.22.10 you can use SQL like:

INSERT INTO table SET x = 1, y = 2, z = 3;
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Which is interesting, but I'm not sure if it is better, and I'm pretty sure it isn't portable. There is a couple of other things that are cool (I never noticed this stuff before!) such as inserting multiple records in 1 statement:

INSERT INTO table (x,y,z) VALUES (1,2,3), (4,5,6), (7,8,9);
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Of course this is only really handy if you know in advance how many records you want to insert.

What I forgot to mention is that you should really be using:

INSERT DELAYED INTO table (x,y,z) VALUES (1,2,3);
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if you are doing multiple inserts as this can give you quite a bit of a performance boost.

gav^