1) can applications set the SQL_MODE themselves? Can an admin configure the server so applications cannot specify mode? If not, what good is it since it won't guarantee your data?

2) My larger frustration with MySQL is I have run into cases of single transactions deadlocking against themselves. These always happen when the following is true:

* Executing an insert statement in the form of INSERT foo (bar) VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4);

* Only one connection/session active at a time (for example during a data migration to MySQL)

* Frequency goes up when more rows are inserted per statement

* Which inserts trigger the deadlocks are not reproducible

I believe this is an issue with race conditions and threads, perhaps a lock contention that isn't being handled properly between index and table writes or the like. I can reproduce it by inserting a couple million rows into a table, a few thousand at a time, but the statements where this occurs varies from one run to the next.

I have never seen braindead locking behavior on PostgreSQL.