Old table
From MediaWiki.org
| ↑ Manual:Contents | MediaWiki database layout | Old table |
| MediaWiki version: | 1.4 |
The old table is where old MediaWiki versions store historical versions of articles; see text table for recent MediaWiki versions. Most fields correspond to the same fields in the cur table.
old_text contents may be compressed, as indicated by "gzip" in the old_flags field. (Data is compressed with the gzdeflate function of PHP: there is no gzip header or checksum, set the window size to negative(?) if not using PHP to read data.)
old_id serves as a unique index for a given revision, with some caveats:
- Since the cur table carries the most recent revision separately, old_id is not assigned to a revision until it is no longer the most recent version of a page
- Since the archive table does not preserve the id number, it will be different after deletion/restoration (but the old number is not reused)
- old_id is not necessarily numerically chronological, either within a given page's history or in the whole database
old_timestamp also may not be unique in a page history series.
"DESCRIBE old" gives the following:
+-------------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +-------------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | old_id | int(8) unsigned | | PRI | NULL | auto_increment | | old_namespace | tinyint(2) unsigned | | | 0 | | | old_title | varchar(255) binary | | | | | | old_text | mediumtext | | | | | | old_comment | tinyblob | | | | | | old_user | int(5) unsigned | | | 0 | | | old_user_text | varchar(255) binary | | | | | | old_timestamp | varchar(14) binary | | | | | | old_minor_edit | tinyint(1) | | | 0 | | | old_flags | tinyblob | | | | | | inverse_timestamp | varchar(14) binary | | | | | +-------------------+---------------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
