Site Health: Alert about missing tables

[claudiosanches]

In Site Health Database's section could include warnings about missing tables, like WooCommerce does: ​https://cloudup.com/crVw1cIAvlQ
Sometimes is hard to debug when is missing some database, also this should cause several problems, having a section warning about it will helps a lot of users.

[Clorith]

Woo is checking their own custom tables, so I feel this is a separate thing (there's no reason Woo couldn't add a Site Health Check looking for their tables though, if that's something they'd like to do).

As for looking up missing tables from WordPress core, I'm a bit on the fence. I'd have to do some testing, but I would expect your install to be unusable if important tables were missing in the first place, I've not tested that though, so I'll have to do a bit of digging to see how that.

And of course, is this a frequent enough scenario to warrant checks for it in the first place ?

[claudiosanches]

@Clorith this isn't related to WooCommerce, we had this idea after having trouble to debug users websites, where for some reason is missing WordPress core tables, when something like that happens it's may become hard to debug for non-dev users. I'm not saying that this is frequent, of course, but it's a tool that can only help people, become easy to debug problems in forums and so on.
I can write a patch for it, it isn't a problem.

[Clorith]

How often is this an issue? I must admit I've not heard of this my self, so having some understanding relating to that would help with deciding if this is something that should be looked into or not.

[claudiosanches]

How often is this an issue?

Well, not something that happens often for sure, but for regular users it's very hard to debug when some table got removed or damaged because some plugin or by malicious code.

[knutsp]

The whole DB schema must be checked, in case structural damage may happen for an average user. Also bad or invalid data may be harmful, like an empty value in an option where an array is expected.

Lost tables are very easy to debug, as it will emit ugly error messages, in log or on page.

IMO: Plugin territory, part of some "WordPress Repair Kit" - not for core.

[Clorith]

As core has a repair procedure (which you need a constant in wp-config.php to access, thisi s more a lower-level feature, and the checking of tables can't be reliably done without knowing what to check for (which may vary depending on plugins, themes etc).

In light of this, I'm closing this out at this time as wontfix. The issue can of course still be discussed further, and if at any point in time any good reasons for looking into this should come up, we can re-classify this ticket at such a time.