INSERT command denied to user? Clean up your DB!

After posting my most recent blogpost, I noticed that I was neither able to create a new one or to post comments on the site. WordPress also supplied me recently with some strange comment notification Emails saying ‘[klauskomenda.com] Please moderate: “”‘. But the notification Email, that normally contains the message someone left on the site was pretty empty. That looked suspicious and I suspected some sort of hacker attack.

When checking the response coming back from the MySQL database when WordPress tried to insert rows, I got something like this:

1142 - INSERT command denied to user 'abc'@'host.com' for table 'comments'

That made me think: “Hm, did my hosting provider remove my DB rights because I paid the bill a few days later than usual?”. Nah, that can’t be. Checking on the hosters website confirmed that, in fact, everything was settled regarding invoices.

And then it hit me. On the DB tab in the hosting providers admin interface it said: “Size: 10 MB of 10 MB used.” D’oh. So that was the reason for that error and, consequently, why no ‘inserts’ couldn’t be performed anymore.

So it was not some bad hacker that caused me headaches.. Turns out, I did not show enough TLC recently to the MySQL database that powers this blog and let it grow and grow over the last months, even years, without deleting tables that were not needed anymore. After doing that, doing some cleanup, I got it down to 5 MB again. And we’re back in business

Attention: If you delete a reasonable amount of data from the database and clear up some space, it might still take up to 30 minutes (at least with my hosting provider), until you are able to run INSERT commands again. So don’t panic if that happens, just be a little patient, grab a coffee, come back and should be fine.

Again, apologies to everyone who wanted to leave a comment. It got lost in the wide open spaces of the internets.