Previous to 8.1 if you defined an attribute with say 100 chars and the contents was too long, it just cut out anything longer than 100 chars - all good.
But now, you get a "Data truncation: Data too long for column..." error. This can actually STOP your processes from working. Now if it is User initiated you will get an error displayed to the user. But if it isn't (like a scheduled process for example) it will throw and error to the log and stop the process. This is quite dangerous, as unless you are checking your logs you don't know the error is happening.
Personally I preferred the old way of dealing with it.
Sample log error below:
2018-10-23 11:10:54,471 ERROR BSVNAME#f3f2139ad3b92ccda063af0b0ae3501f -Execution Exception after starting system process message Internal error. Error persisting business object FZTActivity Data truncation: Data too long for column 'ActivityParent' at row 1
