Programming Tutorials

Table __________ is marked as crashed and should be repaired.

By: Emiley J. in MySQL Tutorials on 2008-09-18  

Recently a friend of mine called me at 12 midnight. His voice was shaky and had a sense of urgency. "My Site is down. Can you help me with it?". I told him, "Its midnight here, do you mind?". He didn't seem to like my sense of humour. He was in panic. I recalled that his site was entirely dynamically generated with PHP and MySQL. All the pages were dynamically generated from the database. So if the database is down, his site is down.

I immediately got up and woke my computer too. It was no surprise that the first thing I did was to access his website and all I could see was a simple blank page. I rang him up again to get his control panel password. I logged into his website's control panel. It took only a few minutes for me to figure out the problem. When I tried to access one of the tables in his database via phpmyadmin, i got this error. Table __________ is marked as crashed and should be repaired.

The solution was right on my face. 'SHOULD BE REPAIRED'. So I used the control panel to see his databases. I chose the one that had this problem and repaired it. Of course there was a 'Repair DB' option provided on the control panel under 'MySQL databases' option. It took only a 3 seconds for the repair to finish successfully.

BINGO. the website was up again. So if you are facing this issue all you have to do is to repair the database in question. Don't panic. In addition take these steps to avoid future panic.

1. Do a regular backup of your databases.
2. Index your tables based on the 'WHERE' clause of your queries.
3. Optimise your SQL queries properly.