Fixing "Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction" for a 'stuck" Mysql table?
From a script I sent a query like this thousands of times to my local database:
update some_table set some_column = some_value
I forgot to add the where part, so the same column was set to the same a value for all the rows in the table and this was done thousands of times and the column was indexed, so the corresponding index was probably updated too lots of times.
I noticed something was wrong, because it took too long, so I killed the script. I even rebooted my computer since then, but something stuck in the table, because simple queries take a very long time to run and when I try dropping the relevant index it fails with this message:
Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction
It's an innodb table, so stuck the transaction is probably implicit. How can I fix this table and remove the stuck transaction from it?
Answer
I had a similar problem and solved it by checking the threads that are running. To see the running threads use the following command in mysql command line interface:
SHOW PROCESSLIST;
It can also be sent from phpMyAdmin if you don't have access to mysql command line interface.
This will display a list of threads with corresponding ids and execution time, so you can KILL the threads that are taking too much time to execute.
In phpMyAdmin you will have a button for stopping threads by using KILL, if you are using command line interface just use the KILL command followed by the thread id, like in the following example:
KILL 115;
This will terminate the connection for the corresponding thread.