As many of you know that this blog runs on WordPress and under the hood of WordPress there is a MySQL database. MySQL database is quite good and is able to hold massive traffic this blog receives every day. However, just like any database MySQL needs tuning as well as proper management of the same. In this blog post we will discuss about how I received a very weird error WordPress Database Error and how I resolved it.
Last week, suddenly I got call from a friend that our blog is loading very slow. Well, when a new blog post is published or newsletter is sent out, it is very common to see a spike in traffic and momentarily slowness in the website performance. However, in this case, the website was consistently running slow. After a while we found a couple of new problems on the site. Due to the slowness of the performance, we also found out that WordPress scheduler was not publishing new blog posts as well as was not taking routine backup of the system.
After careful diagnostic I figured out that the issue was with MySQL Database. When I checked the error log, I found the following error in the log.
[Fri Sep 09 04:58:03 2016] [error] [client] WordPress database error Duplicate entry ‘3354142’ for key ‘PRIMARY’ for query INSERT INTO wp_options (option_name, option_value,autoload) VALUES (…)
It was very clear that there was a primary key violation in the options table. However, the problem was not easy to solve as I had personally not done any transactions with this table or there was no new update or plugin changes in the recent time. My first attempt was to restore this particular table from older database backup (I take frequent backup my site and its database). Even this particular problem failed and I was not able to get rid of the error.
Finally, I searched the internet but alas, there was no real help. At that time, I decided to do various trial and error. Trust me, I spend over 4 hours and various different tricks to get rid of this error. It was very clear to me that it was logical integrity error on the database, I had to spend time with lots of tables and logic. Well, after 4 hours, I finally found a solution and it was a very simple solution. I wish I had known this earlier and would have not spent over 4 hours on various trials and errors.
Solution / Fix:
I just ran following command it my issue was resolved.
REPAIR TABLE wp_options
That’s it! It was done.
The reality was that my table was corrupted and due to the same reason I was getting error related to Duplicate Key for my database table. Once I fixed the corruption of the table, everything worked just fine. Remember, in my case it was wp_options table which was corrupted, you must replace it with your table name and script will just work fine.
Additionally, if you want to just repair all the tables in your database, you can execute following script and it will generate scripts for every single table in your MySQL database. Once you execute the script, you will repair every single table of your database.
SELECT CONCATE('repair table ', table_name, ';')
FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE table_schema='YourDatabaseName';
I hope you find this blog post useful. If you ever have any problem with the WordPress MySQL database, do reach out to me, I will be happy to help you to resolve any error related to the same.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)
First appeared on MySQL – Fix Error – WordPress Database Error Duplicate Entry for key PRIMARY for Query INSERT INTO wp_options