"Data too long for column" - why?

I've written a MySQL script to create a database for hypothetical hospital records and populate it with data. One of the tables, Department, has a column named Description, which is declared as type varchar(200). When executing the INSERT command for Description I get an error:

error 1406: Data too long for column 'Description' at row 1.

All the strings I'm inserting are less than 150 characters.

Here's the declaration:

CREATE TABLE Department(
    ...
    Description varchar(200)
    ...);

And here's the insertion command:

INSERT INTO Department VALUES
(..., 'There is some text here',...), (..., 'There is some more text over here',...);

By all appearances, this should be working. Anyone have some insight?

Change column type to LONGTEXT

I had a similar problem when migrating an old database to a new version.

Switch the MySQL mode to not use STRICT.

SET @@global.sql_mode= 'NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION';

Error Code: 1406. Data too long for column - MySQL

There is an hard limit on how much data can be stored in a single row of a mysql table, regardless of the number of columns or the individual column length.

As stated in the OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION

The maximum row size constrains the number (and possibly size) of columns because the total length of all columns cannot exceed this size. For example, utf8 characters require up to three bytes per character, so for a CHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 column, the server must allocate 255 × 3 = 765 bytes per value. Consequently, a table cannot contain more than 65,535 / 765 = 85 such columns.

Storage for variable-length columns includes length bytes, which are assessed against the row size. For example, a VARCHAR(255) CHARACTER SET utf8 column takes two bytes to store the length of the value, so each value can take up to 767 bytes.

Here you can find INNODB TABLES LIMITATIONS

Varchar has its own limits. Maybe try changing datatype to text.!