Manual:Page table

The page table can be considered the "core of the wiki". Each page in a MediaWiki installation has an entry here which identifies it by title and contains some essential metadata. It was first introduced in r6710, in MediaWiki 1.5.

The text of the page itself is stored in the text table. To retrieve the text of an article, MediaWiki first searches for page_title in this table. Then, page_latest is used to search the revision table for rev_id, and rev_text_id is obtained in the process. The value obtained for rev_text_id is used to search for old_id in the text table to retrieve the text.

If you want to completely delete a page manually from the database, be sure to delete the entry for the page in the page table, and for all the page's revisions in the revision table, and all of the text rows corresponding to the page in the text table. Deleting entries from the text table to delete pages can cause unexpected results. Deleting rows from the text table does not delete a page itself; the revisions will remain in the page's history, and the page itself will appear in search results. However, the contents of the page will be destroyed; the versions in the history will remain, but they will be empty, as they will have no text to accompany them.

Due to the way the archive table operates, these revisions cannot be restored. They are permanently deleted.

page_id
Uniquely identifying primary key. This value is preserved across edits and renames, but not deletion and recreation. For example, for this page, page_id = 10501.

page_namespace
A page name is broken into a namespace and a title. The namespace keys are UI-language-independent constants, defined in includes/Defines.php.

This field contains the number of the page's namespace. The values range from 0 to 15 for the standard namespaces, and from 100 to 255 for custom namespaces.

page_title
The sanitized page title, without the title of its namespace. It is stored as text, with spaces replaced by underscores.

page_restrictions
Comma-separated set of permission keys indicating who can move or edit the page.

Beginning with MediaWiki 1.10, page protection controls were moved to the page restrictions table.

page_counter
Number of times this page has been viewed.

page_is_redirect
A value of 1 here indicates the article is a redirect; it is 0 in all other cases.

page_is_new
This field stores whether the page is a new entry or not; if the field contains a value of 1, then it indicates that the page is a new entry with only one edit. It is 0 in all other cases.

page_random
Random value between 0 and 1, used for Special:Randompage.

page_touched
This timestamp is updated whenever the page changes in a way requiring it to be re-rendered, invalidating caches. Aside from editing this includes permission changes, creation or deletion of linked pages, and alteration of contained templates.

page_latest
This is the key to rev_id for the current revision. This may be 0 during page creation.

page_len
Uncompressed length in bytes of the page's current source text.

Schema summary
DESCRIBE page in MediaWiki 1.5 through 1.10 results in: mysql> describe mw_page; +---+-+--+-+-++ +---+-+--+-+-++ +---+-+--+-+-++ 11 rows in set (0.02 sec)
 * Field                | Type                | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
 * page_id              | int(8) unsigned     | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
 * page_namespace       | int(11)             | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
 * page_title           | varchar(255)        | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * page_restrictions    | tinyblob            | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * page_counter         | bigint(20) unsigned | NO   |     | 0       |                |
 * page_is_redirect     | tinyint(1) unsigned | NO   |     | 0       |                |
 * page_is_new          | tinyint(1) unsigned | NO   |     | 0       |                |
 * page_random          | double unsigned     | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |
 * page_touched         | char(14)            | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * page_latest          | int(8) unsigned     | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
 * page_len             | int(8) unsigned     | NO   | MUL | NULL    |                |