I logged into my own WordPress site and then glanced at the Site Health screen, noticing something new that I hadn’t seen before about having an old version of SQL server. WordPress stores all of the Pages and Posts in a database file with multiple tables, and the two popular supported formats are MySQL and MariaDB.
My next step was to login at the web hosting vendor, IONOS, just to see which version of MySQL was being used.
I looked for some quick method to update my MySQL version, but during a quick chat session with tech support I learned that I had to follow these steps:
- Export the old database to a SQL file
- Create a new database
- Edit the exported SQL file to use the new database name
- Import the SQL file
- Edit my wp-config.php file with the new database info
So that process took just a few minutes, and now I have a new database, this time using the MariaDB format, which is reported to be faster than the MySQL format.
Yes, with WordPress we do need to keep the PHP and SQL versions updated to the latest releases, for compatibility, speed and security reasons. If you don’t feel comfortable making these detailed changes, then let me know and I can help out.
