On Thu, 17 Jun 1999, Eric Ding wrote:

: used to store strings that can be larger than 255 characters. On the : Alpha port, creating a table with text (as opposed to varchar) datatypes : and then adding entries in somehow corrupts the table. If I try do a : "select *" command, then the server will often crash. When it doesn't : crash, it shows garbled/chopped text or none at all. I've included below : a log from a MySQL session.

I've seen it. It's very likely a thread-locking problem, as I've seen it do things like make all rows of a column have the first four characters correct, and then the rest are all the same for every row, i.e.:

applchoke oranchoke lettchoke kiwichoke spinchoke carrchoke artichoke

This reeks of race condition.