Maybe I'm not pushing it enough but if that's the case, why should I jump through hoops to set up something I won't be making good use of?
If you find the usability of MySQL better than Postgres, and you don't put a lot of value on your data, then choosing MySQL is fine. The author is right to point out that a lot of the complaints are really just "this doesn't have to be this way." You should really expect your database to enforce non-null, especially if it lets you specify it and doesn't warn you it's not going to do a damn thing about it.
As I mentioned in my comment above, you can fix buggy applications, but you can't fix incorrect data.
Funny (and I use the term loosely) you should mention that.
I've just recently witnessed a situation where a BI[1] analyst was brought in around the same time I was and realized that, not only was there likely data missing, but, worse, much of the data was wrong. Said analyst has been spending a remarkable amount of effort merely convincing everyone else that the reporting logic/infrastructure wasn't broken so much as the data.
I'm not convinced MySQL itself is to blame, but it's Awfully Suspicious, considering the use of MyISAM and a kludgy, if not exotic, replication setup.
[1] Business Intelligence, aka reporting. I'm not sure how common the term is. Presumably a small company that hires someone for this role considers the data to be extremely valuable.
It does. The author of the article was wrong.
I really don't understand why people have such a problem with this (and boy oh boy am I loosing a lot of karma for this opinion).
It's not like it forces this on you. First you can turn it off, and second it only happens if you leave out the columns from the insert, don't leave out the columns and you have nothing to worry about.
I personally find it quite useful. I set column defaults as needed for real data, but when testing I let MySQL put in empty values - it saves having to type each and every column that I don't care about.
If you want to specify a default, well, specify a default.
If my data integrity was so very important, I'd pass the buck to someone who knew their beans and they could find & maintain me a safe db. I'm a competent amateur (hence MySQL), not a DBA :)