Fun little headache

chadedge

1 reason that clients that host on servers that give said client access to phpmyadmin should not be given this access:

One of my clients (basic needs, nothing too fancy; virtual hosted site (they setup before I joined), single MySQL db, ssh access) recently decided to "start messing around with MySQL."

Now that I've struck fear with the quote "start messing around.." I'm sure you know what comes next: they created a table with no name 🙂. Blank table name. I can't tell if there's rows, or if there's cols. The sucker just exists.

Anyone know how to "dump table name" when there's no table name? Literally you're asing for this:

dump table name;

Which will result in "error you Timmy. You've gotta have a table name. Jaysus!"
//your errors may vary, but you get the point.

Any ideas?

helz

cant you delete it thru phpmyadmin?

well if push comes to shove you can always backup the tables and re-do the db

drawmack

I would say backup all the valid tables to another database, deelete the current database and then recreate it from the back up.

jayant

Shhhhhhhhh!
It should work, but dont tell to anyone else

go to the directory where mysql is installed
then int the 'data' directory and finally into the
<database-name> directory

the files here in will be

with extensions frm, MYD, MYI

since there isnt any table name

look for file

.frm
.myd
.myi

there might be spaces in there as well, so

also check for that

the format is
<table-name>.frm
<table-name>.MYD
<table-name>.MYI

just rename the files to any <table-name> (all 3 same)

and voila, you have renamed your mysql tables

now do whatever u want

drawmack

don't forget to add the x2 idiot fee onto your price for fixing this.

helz

good idea jayant, i never knew there was a seperate file for each table, i would have thought it would just be one db file

jayant

Originally posted by drawmack
don't forget to add the x2 idiot fee onto your price for fixing this.

quadruple should be better than double.

x2 - idiot fee
x2 - idiot.fee2 since paying the idiot fee
= x4 🙂

doing again
x2 = idiot.fee3 for paying idiot.fee2
nah..., would be too much

hence settled with quadruple :p

chadedge

Thanks for the db renaming idea.

the client is virtual-hosted w/ no ssh.

Thankfully, there was also a GDLib problem. The host moved the domain to a new box (which allowed me to mysql dump - the bad table).

I also got to make a lot of other changes to the db that needed to be made (ie: storing dates in a field called 'datetime' as 0000-00-00 00:00:00 instead of a timetsamp. a real bitch when you want to do some date functions).

Little updates like that go a long way to reducing spaghetti.

Thanks again for the idea. Might have to try that just for kicks on another box (locally).