Sadly MySQL has a history of bugs like this. There are a few we have run across that have probably been open longer than this bug, and yet have not been fixed. I'd have to look the bug numbers up from e-mail, but yeah.. there are tons of mines out there in MySQL just waiting for you to hit them, and upon further discovery, someone else found out about it years ago!
I've had many experiences like this as well. Even some of our paid for software gets scared if you use a buggy MySQL version (TeamCity for example refuses to start on certain MySQL versions).
I find it much easier from an admin and dev perspective. It is less forgiving, that is correct, but that's a good thing. Oh and the documentation is wonderful compared to MySQL.
shrug Everyone hates on MySQL, and I have my periods of hate as well (mostly I think they boil down to actually hating the Developers of MySQL, not the actual software)... But the thing is that for our purposes MySQL works and works well 99.9% of the time. Additionally the actual big, real issues/beefs people have with MySQL are mostly fixed in 5.6 (multi-threaded slaves (really guys, you should have fixed that years ago), online ALTER TABLE (again... wtf, why was that not fixed years ago)).
He also is hating on PHP in that article, which seems like prime HN bait, because as it does every time there is a PHP hate article on here, everyone actually doing real work comes and and says 'Okay, have fun with your rubies and nodes'.
With all that said, recently a lot of our data has started to be organized outside of MySQL (a lot more Couchbase and Solr usage), but MySQL is still there driving the core data. I'd say it all boils down to right tool for the job.
