Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

I was running 1.4 and a few days ago I upgraded to 1.5beta3.  I ran the two
commandline php upgrade scripts in order --  upgrade1_5.php update.php.

The upgrade seemed to have been completely transparent and successful. Then late
friday afternoon (it's always a late friday afternoon, isn't it?), people began
to notice that searching wasn't working.

I'm not that familiar with mediawiki's internals yet, but I think I this may
provide some relevant info:

New articles created since the upgrade are not getting into the index. I even
dropped and rebuilt in search index with rebuildtextindex.php hoping that would
work, but I still get the same results -- only content created while still
running the 1.4 version is showing up in the search results even after a rebuild.

I *think*, but am not really not sure, that it has something to with how stuff
gets into the index. The index update is triggered by data in the
'recentchanges' table? The updateSearchIndex.php script seems to select against
the recentchanges table to find out what to put in the search index. 

In trying to track in down further, I found that running the
'rebuildrecentchanges.php' script dies with this error:

 php rebuildrecentchanges.php
Loading from CUR table...
Loading from OLD table...
A database error has occurred
Query: INSERT INTO `recentchanges`
(rc_timestamp,rc_cur_time,rc_user,rc_user_text,rc_namespace,rc_title,rc_comment,rc_minor,rc_bot,rc_new,rc_cur_id,rc_this_oldid,rc_last_oldid,rc_type)
SELECT
old_timestamp,cur_timestamp,old_user,old_user_text,old_namespace,old_title,old_comment,old_minor_edit,0,0,cur_id,old_id,0,0
FROM `old`,`cur` WHERE old_namespace=cur_namespace AND old_title=cur_title ORDER
BY old_timestamp DESC LIMIT 5000
Function:
Error: 1146 Table 'midev_wiki_db.old' doesn't exist

And sure enough, the 'old' table does not exist in my schema. Further, when I
ran the script, *I lost all of the recent changes data made since the upgrade.*
 The content and history of individual articles was not lost, and new edits do
still go into the recentchanges table.  But I'm afraid I just lost several days
of recent changes data by running a maintenance script.

I will continue to investigate as time allows.