String too long about zebra_session

[stefangabos]

I haven't encountered this issue but it looks like something related to a db difference rather than it being related to PHP version difference.

Here it says that this happens when MySQL is in strict mode and it may be that on a previous environment it wasn't. The result in both cases is the same - data longer than the supported size is written to the db, BUT TRUNCATED TO FIT!, the only difference being that a warning is generated in strict mode, while the action is done silently when not in strict mode (and maybe this is why you had no errors previously)

If the data you have is really large you can change the session_data column type to MEDIUM BLOB or LONG BLOB depending on the size of the data you are planning to store.

Also, if you have to store so much data in the session a better solution would be to use redis or memcache instead of the session

[stefangabos]

In my previous comment I forgot to mention that although data is indeed written to the db, it is truncated to fit the allowed size. I updated my previous comment

[joebordes]

great answer

[schmidtl4]

Great response. Very helpful. Your instinct about the use of strict mode was spot on. It is possible that the amount of session data grew directly as a result of changing PHP versions, but it is more likely that the use of session data grew as the code features/functionality continued to expand after the change, Combined with the strict mode defaults for PHP 8, the error resulted. The net result is that changing the session_data column to MEDIUM BLOB fixed the issue. Thank you!