Upgrading to MySQL 5.7? Beware of the new STRICT mode

This blog post discusses the ramifications of STRICT mode in MySQL 5.7.

In short

By default, MySQL 5.7 is much “stricter” than older versions of MySQL. That can make your application fail. To temporarily fix this, change the SQL_MODE to NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION (same as in MySQL 5.6):

MySQL 5.7, dates and default values

The default SQL_MODE in MySQL 5.7 is:

That makes MySQL operate in “strict” mode for transactional tables.

“Strict mode controls how MySQL handles invalid or missing values in data-change statements such as INSERT or UPDATE. A value can be invalid for several reasons. For example, it might have the wrong data type for the column, or it might be out of range. A value is missing when a new row to be inserted does not contain a value for a non-NULL column that has no explicit DEFAULT clause in its definition. (For a NULL column, NULL is inserted if the value is missing.) Strict mode also affects DDL statements such as CREATE TABLE.”

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/sql-mode.html#sql-mode-strict

That also brings up an interesting problem with the default value for the date/datetime column. Let’s say we have the following table in MySQL 5.7, and want to insert a row into it:

The event_date does not have a default value, and we are inserting a row without a value for event_date. That causes an error in MySQL 5.7. If we can’t use NULL, we will have to create a default value. In strict mod,e we can’t use “0000-00-00” either:

We have to use a real date:

Or, a most likely much better approach is to change the application logic to:

• allow NULLs, or
• always insert the real dates (i.e. use NOW() function), or
• change the table field to timestamp and update it automatically if no value has been assigned

Further reading

Read the Morgan Tocker’s article on how to transition to MySQL 5.7, and check the full sql_mode documentation