In Python (and most sane scripting languages) when something unexpected happens an exception is raised and execution stops. Damien Katz calls this the "Get the Hell out of Dodge" error handling method in his seminal Error codes or Exceptions? Why is Reliable Software so Hard?. In his article Damien explains several different ways of handling errors. None of the options is to ignore that something went wrong. That's because ignoring problems only makes them worse. But that's exactly what PHP and MySQL do for certain classes of errors.

Here's how Python handles failure:

% python
>>> print a
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'a' is not defined
>>>

PHP's default behavior is to just keep chugging along ignoring problems that could cause huge issues:

 % php 2> >(while read line; do echo -e "stderr> $line"; done)
<?
printf("%d\n", $a);
?>
0
stderr> PHP Notice:  Undefined variable: a in - on line 2
stderr> PHP Stack trace:
stderr> PHP   1. {main}() -:0

A "notice", eh? Really? If you try to delete a record from a database using sprintf to ensure it is a decimal and accidentally pass in an undefined variable as the id PHP will happily tell the database to delete the record with the id of "0". In my opinion this deserves more than a "notice" in the logs. PHP's default error-handling behavior is a recipe for disaster.

Fortunately, if you must use PHP, there is a way to make PHP behave in a more sane manner and force every unexpected event to raise an exception (exception_error_handler from http://www.php.net/manual/en/class.errorexception.php):

 % php 2> >(while read line; do echo -e "stderr> $line"; done)
<?
function exception_error_handler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline ) {
    throw new ErrorException($errstr, 0, $errno, $errfile, $errline);
}
set_error_handler("exception_error_handler");

printf("%d\n", $a);
?>
stderr> PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'ErrorException' with message 'Undefined variable: a' in -:7
stderr> Stack trace:
stderr> #0 -(7): exception_error_handler(8, 'Undefined varia...', '-', 7, Array)
stderr> #1 {main}
stderr> thrown in - on line 7

There is one huge problem with this. If you are building on an existing PHP project or have a ton of PHP code it's likely that you will see frequent breaks once you make failure the default. That's a direct result of the language designers choosing such lenient default behavior. If you are starting a new project using PHP you should get your head checked (see phpsadness.com). If you pass a psychological evaluation and you still for some reason want to build a new project using PHP you should turn on immediate failure by using the error handler mentioned above and write tests to exercise your code. You'll thank me later.

Now, let's look at default behaviors of some popular databases:

 % psql
# create table simple_table (col varchar(10));
CREATE TABLE
# insert into simple_table (col) values ('1234567890a');
ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(10)

 % mysql
mysql> create table simple_table (col varchar(10));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.23 sec)

mysql> insert into simple_table (col) values ('1234567890a');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.08 sec)

mysql> select * from simple_table;
+------------+
| col        |
+------------+
| 1234567890 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Yup, by default MySQL just silently truncates your data. Ronald Bradford, a self-proclaimed MySQL Expert sums it up nicely: "By default, MySQL does not enforce data integrity." That should set off alarm bells in your head if you are using or considering using MySQL. The whole point of a database is to store valid data. The simple solution is to use a database that cares about your data like Postgres but if you must use MySQL you should set

SQL_MODE=STRICT_ALL_TABLES

For more on why this is necessary see Ronald Bradford's Why SQL_MODE is Important blog post.

PHP and MySQL are widely used. Maybe it is because their default settings are so lenient that it makes it easy for beginners to pick up. No one really cares if there was an error saving a hit on your personal homepage to your database. The problem is that these settings are not conducive to writing quality software. When starting from scratch it's better to choose technologies that have smarter defaults like Python and PostgreSQL because the libraries and software written using these technologies will properly fail instead of doing unexpected things and filling your database with garbage.

PS

You can (and should in most cases) also force hard failure for bash scripts by running set -e at the top of the script. See David Pashley's Writing Robust Shell Scripts for more.