Rebuilding the Ancestor Table

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The way you fix problems with the ancestor table changed significantly in Confluence 6.14.

If you're using Confluence 6.13 or earlier, see Rebuilding the Ancestor Table in Confluence 6.13.5 or earlier to find out how to rebuild the ancestor table.  

The ancestor table records the parent and descendant (child) relationship between pages. It is also used when determining whether a page will inherit view restrictions from a parent page. 

Occasionally records in the ancestor table can become corrupted. The Repair the Ancestors Table scheduled job finds and automatically fixes problems in the ancestors table in all current spaces.  The job runs daily. 

The job ignores archived spaces, so if you suspect there is a problem with the ancestor table in a particular archived space, you will need to change the status of the space to 'current', then run the job manually. 

Repair the ancestor table manually

If you suspect there is a problem, you can also run this job manually. 

  1. Go to Administration  > General Configuration > Scheduled Jobs.
  2. Locate the Repair the Ancestors Table job and choose Run

The job should complete quickly, and there won't be any impact on users.

Viewing the job results

If you want to see the result of the job each time it runs, you can change the logging level of com.atlassian.confluence.pages.ancestors to INFO. 

You'll then see a message similar to the one below in the Confluence application log, each time the job runs:

Ancestors have been repaired. Found and fixed 3 broken pages. 
It took 71 sec for 6407 spaces, average space processing time 0 sec.

Rebuilding the ancestor table in earlier Confluence versions

If you're using Confluence 6.13 or earlier the way you rebuild the ancestor table is different. See Rebuilding the Ancestor Table in Confluence 6.13.5 or earlier for more information.  

Last modified on May 25, 2023

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