When a CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE command is issued, MariaDB will silently change a column specification in the following cases:

• PRIMARY KEY columns are always NOT NULL.
• Any trailing spaces from SET and ENUM values are discarded.
• TIMESTAMP columns are always NOT NULL, and display sizes are discarded
• A row-size limit of 65535 bytes applies
• If strict SQL mode is not enabled, a VARCHAR column longer than 65535 become TEXT, and a VARBINARY columns longer than 65535 becomes a BLOB. If strict mode is enabled the silent changes will not be made, and an error will occur.
• If a USING clause specifies an index that's not permitted by the storage engine, the engine will instead use another available index type that can be applied without affecting results.
• If the CHARACTER SET binary attribute is specified, the column is created as the matching binary data type. A TEXT becomes a BLOB, CHAR a BINARY and VARCHAR a VARBINARY. ENUMs and SETs are created as defined.

To ease imports from other RDBMS's, MariaDB will also silently map the following data types:

Currently, all MySQL types are supported in MariaDB.

For type mapping between Cassandra and MariaDB, see Cassandra storage engine.

Example

Silent changes in action:

CREATE TABLE SilenceIsGolden
   (
    f1 TEXT CHARACTER SET binary,
    f2 VARCHAR(15) CHARACTER SET binary,
    f3 CHAR CHARACTER SET binary,
    f4 ENUM('x','y','z') CHARACTER SET binary,
    f5 VARCHAR (65536),
    f6 VARBINARY (65536),
    f7 INT1
   );
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 2 warnings (0.31 sec)

SHOW WARNINGS;
+-------+------+-----------------------------------------------+
| Level | Code | Message                                       |
+-------+------+-----------------------------------------------+
| Note  | 1246 | Converting column 'f5' from VARCHAR to TEXT   |
| Note  | 1246 | Converting column 'f6' from VARBINARY to BLOB |
+-------+------+-----------------------------------------------+

DESCRIBE SilenceIsGolden;
+-------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type              | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| f1    | blob              | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| f2    | varbinary(15)     | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| f3    | binary(1)         | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| f4    | enum('x','y','z') | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| f5    | mediumtext        | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| f6    | mediumblob        | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| f7    | tinyint(4)        | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+-------+-------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+