Manual:Content table

The content table represents content objects. A content row represents a slot of a wiki page. The same content row can be reused for many revisions (e.g. when the edits only changed other slots); its association with revisions is tracked by the slots table.

The content table does not hold the actual content (such as the wikitext of a page), just a reference to it. Its primary purpose is to provide the necessary meta-data for loading and interpreting a serialized data blob to create a content object.

It was introduced in MediaWiki 1.31 as part of the Multi-Content Revisions project; see Multi-Content Revisions/Content Meta-Data for details. During migration from older versions, the table is populated by populateContentTables.php (run automatically by the upgrade script).

content_id
ID of the content object

content_size
Nominal size of the content object (not necessarily of the serialized blob)

content_sha1
Nominal hash of the content object (not necessarily of the serialized blob)

content_model
Reference to. Note the serialization format isn't specified; it should be assumed to be in the default format for the model unless auto-detected otherwise.

content_address
URL-like address of the content blob. Usually the structure is: where  is a number referencing the  column. It might be different when using external storage.

Schema summary
+-+--+--+-+-++ +-+--+--+-+-++ +-+--+--+-+-++
 * Field          | Type                 | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
 * content_id     | bigint(20) unsigned  | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
 * content_size   | int(10) unsigned     | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * content_sha1   | varbinary(32)        | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * content_model  | smallint(5) unsigned | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * content_address | varbinary(255)      | NO   |     | NULL    |                |

Indexes
 +-++--+--+-+---+-+--++--++-+---+ +-++--+--+-+---+-+--++--++-+---+ +-++--+--+-+---+-+--++--++-+---+
 * Table  | Non_unique | Key_name | Seq_in_index | Column_name | Collation | Cardinality | Sub_part | Packed | Null | Index_type | Comment | Index_comment |
 * content |         0 | PRIMARY  |            1 | content_id  | A         |           0 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |