I’m not sure exactly what the message you see looks like. Your text does not seem to be complete. In the sentence you can at least see the name “args”, which is probably a column name of a database table. This column name does not exist in WordPress core, so I suspect a connection with a plugin you are using.
The message itself indicates an incompatibility between the plugin causing the error and your database server. Either the database server is too old or the causing plugin is not up-to-date enough. Whether the message has any effect on the functioning of your project cannot be assessed without knowing the causing plugin.
You should therefore find the plugin that is causing the problem. There may be further information on this in the full error message. Alternatively, you would have to deactivate all plugins and then activate them individually until the message appears again – then you will have found the culprit plugin.
Here’s one of the full messages, this one from MemberPress:
[05-Dec-2024 19:27:01 UTC] WordPress database error BLOB, TEXT, GEOMETRY or JSON column ‘args’ can’t have a default value for query ALTER TABLE wp_mepr_jobs ALTER COLUMN args SET DEFAULT ” made by require_once(‘wp-load.php’), require_once(‘wp-config.php’), require_once(‘wp-settings.php’), do_action(‘init’), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, MeprDbCtrl->upgrade_needed, MeprDbCtrl->upgrade, MeprDb->upgrade, dbDelta
It seems pretty clear that this is not a generic plugin conflict, but rather something that happened because I went to the new WP without updating all the plugins first. I’ve updated WP on a couple of other sites recently, bringing all the plugins up to date *before* updating WordPress and didn’t have these errors.
Just to be clear, these errors *only* happened when I updated the plugins after updating WP. They are not ongoing. What I’m looking to understand is whether some “damage” has been done to the Database, or whether these were just transient errors and the site is OK.
The table name “wp_mepr_jobs” indicates that this belongs to the MemberPress plugin. I would therefore recommend that you contact their support team with your question: https://memberpress.com/support/ – as this is a commercial product, they will not be able to help you here in the forum.
Yes, as I mentioned above, that particular one was from Memberpress. As a last resort I’ll give up here and start talking to individual plugin vendors. It just seems to me that this clearly has to do with the transition to WP 6.7 and not a sudden problem with multiple plugins. So I had hoped somebody here might recognize the problem.
What’s your database provider and version?
MySql 8.0.22 – I’m not sure about what “provider” means. The site is running on AWS Lightsail using a Bitnami build.
I found this change in WordPress 3 months ago, that might explain why this suddenly cropped up: https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/commit/c8d4bc734fcf35c34f042b29d0897a955680ac0b#diff-a63b93100f808defdbeb421a52529c5a7c00440bacb0fb229d41ac476f8660abR3164
I can’t speak for the other plugins, but at least from the MemberPress side, we’re looking into it.
For anyone else coming here, if your plugin uses dbDelta. It looks like we’re going need to alter the text and longtext in CREATE TABLE statements to not set a DEFAULT or if MySQL 8.13.0+ we’ll need to surround the default in parenthesis.
Thanks @cartpauj, this does appear to be what’s needed. I’ll mention this to any other plugins I run into that have the problem.
