MySQL Will Quietly Eat Your Data If You Let It: Truncation, Charsets, and the 1366 You Never See
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A WhatsApp button on a shop was dialling the wrong number. Not a formatting problem — a genuinely different number, three digits short of the one in the admin panel. The admin panel had saved it. The page was reading it. Nothing errored. The column was varchar(10), the number arrived with a country code, and MySQL had done exactly what it was configured to do: chop the value to fit and carry on. That column had been wrong for months. Nobody noticed because nothing anywhere in the stack raised