Use MySQL’s Strict Mode on all new Projects!

Lukas EderNovember 21st, 2014Last Updated: November 20th, 2014

1 12 2 minutes read

MySQL is a database that has been bending the SQL standard in ways that make it hard to move off MySQL. What may appear to be a clever technique for vendor lockin (or maybe just oversight of the standard) can be quite annoying in understanding the real meaning of the SQL language.

One such example is MySQL’s interpretation of how GROUP BY works. In MySQL, unlike any other database, you can put arbitrary expressions into your SELECT clause, even if they do not have a formal dependency on the GROUP BY expression. For instance:

SELECT employer, first_name, last_name
FROM employees
GROUP BY employer

This will work in MySQL, but what does it mean? If we only have one resulting record per employer, which one of the employees will be returned? The semantics of the above query is really this one:

SELECT employer, ARBITRARY(first_name), ARBITRARY(last_name)
FROM employees
GROUP BY employer

If we assume that there is such an aggregation function as ARBITRARY(). Some may claim that this can be used for some clever performance “optimisation”. I say: Don’t. This is so weakly specified, it is not even clear if the two references of this pseudo-ARBITRARY() aggregate function will produce values from the same record.

Just look at the number of Stack Overflow questions that evolve around the “not a GROUP BY expression” error:

I’m sure that parts of this damage that has been caused to a generation of SQL developers is due to the fact that this works in some databases.

ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY

But there is a flag in MySQL called ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY, and Morgan Tocker, the MySQL community manager suggests eventually turning it on by default.

MySQL community members tend to agree that this is a good decision in the long run.

While it is certainly very hard to turn this flag on for a legacy application, all new applications built on top of MySQL should make sure to turn on this flag. In fact, new applications should even consider turning on “strict SQL mode” entirely, to make sure they get a better, more modern SQL experience.

For more information about MySQL server modes, please consider the manual:

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

Reference:

Use MySQL’s Strict Mode on all new Projects! from our JCG partner Lukas Eder at the JAVA, SQL, AND JOOQ blog.