MediaWiki: “1048: Column ‘old_id’ cannot be null”
February 25th, 2009
If you get this error with MediaWiki (or any other software) you should look at the properties of your table structure. Most probable is that an “auto_increment” is missing. This problem took me quite a while to find, especially because of lots of people on the web come up with the weirdest explanations and solutions, like simply reinstalling and re-importing the data. Not fun if you are in a hurry and have a table with 7.5 million text files.
This post saved my bacon! My web hosting service did something that erased the auto_increment flag on every table in every database that we had with them, and I was stumped. They said the problem was with my web apps. But of course they had all been working perfectly for over a year, then suddenly all failed at the same time.
Bob