Blog Foo

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Shame]

Ok, so that was 20 mins of my life I'm never getting back. It would appear that my blog has been a little under the weather for the past day or so. Could not post comments, could not login to Movable Type, pretty much anything non-static was all rather dead.

Movable Type generated the following error every time I attempted to do anything

Statement has no result columns to bind (perhaps you need to successfully call execute first) at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI.pm line 108. at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 909

WTF? I haven't touched Movable Type in ages. No upgrades, no new plugins. Hmm, obviously having issues with reading something from the database. So I ssh onto the box hosting my site to see what else MT::ObjectDriver::DBI and MT::App::CMS might be up to. Yep, looks database related.

So, all in a panic because I haven't done a database backup in a while I gingerly fire up MySQL Query Browser and cross my fingers as I attempt login to the database box. Ok so far, can login to MySQL on that box, I see my blog database, I see tables. I'm beginning to calm down a little at this point. Running a select count(*) from mt_entry revealed that I still have as many blog entries as I should have. Phew. So perhaps a table is corrupted?

And that, as they say, hit the nail on the head. A check table mt_blog; revealed it was the corrupted table. So a quick repair table mt_blog; did the trick and here we are. All better. Might have been a little nicer if the MT error messages were a little bit more intuitive and perhaps hinted at a corrupted table or even what table it was attempting to query when the error occurred.

And remember kids, database backups are your friend.