“Data too long for column” - why?

Question

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,

Answer 1

Turns out, as is often the case, it was a stupid error on my part. The way I was testing this, I wasn't rebuilding the Department table after changing the data type from varchar(50) to varchar(200); I was just re-running the insert command, still with the column as varchar(50).