Purging old links from SQL DB

This may be obvious to most people, but it took me a while to figure it out. So I’m sharing it here for the benefit of other code-illiterates.

Recently moved my blog to a new domain host. Took a few hours to reset plugins, update links and backup targets, etc., but eventually it all worked.

One glitch was that in browsing through the blog, some permalinks kept trying to find the old host. This cleared itself up in a day or two; perhaps DB changes have to propagate or something.

Out of curiosity, though, I used cPanel’s phpMyAdmin to search the database for the old-host URL entries. I found *thousands* of them, mostly on post revisions, but other places too. I then searched some other terms for info I didn’t want to appear on the new site. Lots of those too.

Hand-editing that many entries would have taken days. Fortunately, some nice person has posted a quick way to do a global search-and-replace on the DB:

http://www.booser.com/server-wizzard/mysql/search-and-replace-text-string-in-mysql-database-with-phpmyadmin.html

Took this newbie about 20 minutes to configure the replace function correctly, then just another 15 just fix thousands of entries in several tables. Really appreciated Booser’s post, and I hope it helps someone else.

-Ctenos