I ran into the same kind of error with numbers -- when you try to put a number over 127 into a tinyint column, it "truncates" it to 127 and gives no warning.

The problem was clearly my fault, but I was amazed that I could type "set number_column = 128 where foo" and it would set it to 127 and report nothing out of the ordinary. I kind of understand the truncating of strings, but reducing numbers to fit seemed like it had violated a really important principle.

Anyone know how to set that SQL Mode when working with DBI?