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MySQL ERROR 1062 - Duplicate entry for key PRIMARY

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This blog post was published more than one year ago and might be outdated!
· One min read
Stephan Hochdörfer
Stephan Hochdörfer
Head of IT Business Operations

Simply put, error 1062 is caused when MySQL finds a DUPLICATE of a row you are trying to insert. I sometimes hit this error when importing database dumps of applications that have been in production for a long time. The “fix” is easy: Find the duplicate data and delete it. Depending on your database structure it might not be that easy though. I that case, I configure MySQL to ignore those errors, for local development I find that approach acceptable. For dockerized setups, you can pass a “sql_mode” flag to the container which then will be interpreted by the MySQL server during startup. The docker-compose configuration that works for me looks like this:

db:
  image: percona:5.7
  ports:
    - "3306:3306"
  env_file: env/db.env
  command: --sql_mode="ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,NO_AUTO_VALUE_ON_ZERO"
  volumes:
   - dbdata:/var/lib/mysql