What database table stores comments for JIRA Download version?

[dms117]

I'm trying to determine if a particular user made comments in our JIRA instance. Can anyone tell me where the issue comments are stored? By "where" I am refering to the name of the database table. Thanks in advance for your help!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You can read it straight off their activity stream in their profile.

Or, if you insist on SQL, look in "jiraaction". You'll probably want to join it to jiraissue to find out which issues the comments were made on.

[dms117]

Thanks Nic! Found just what I needed, I appreciate the assist.

[Muyeen Ansar]

@Nic,

What else could be in the jiraaction table other than comments?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Older Jira systems used to store other stuff in there, so you might find historical data from version 2 if your system goes back that far.

I don't think the more recent versions of Jira store anything other than comments in it, but I'm not 100% sure. If you've found things other than comments in there, be interesting to take a look.

[MattS]

One might reasonably wonder why the table is not called something such as "comments". I suspect in the early days everything that wasn't core issue data lived there.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you've inherited a really old Jira dataset (as in 2.1 or lower, although you don't want to rely on my memory for the exact versions), you might find Jiraaction has history data for issues updated while it was on that version. I don't know if later versions actively copy or move the history data to changegroup and changeitem though. I just remember finding a batch of historical non-comment actions in the table!

[Ryan Hoke]

@Nic Brough [Adaptavist], one step deeper: how do I tell from the actions table which comments were internal and which were responses to customer? Is there a table that associates the action with the security level?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hmm. I'm not sure how it works in servicedesk. In plain JIRA, the column "rolelevel" on Jiraaction covers it.

[Ryan Hoke]

Yeah, nothing in that column for service desk comments

[Marcel Verhoeven]

We have a lot of people joining and leaving the projects / company so after a couple of years out of the 1500 users about 950 had been given the status "inactive".  I also struggled not being able to delete user because some comments still were associated. I did the following to resolve this (  please do this only at your own risk and make sure your environment is properly backupped etc ).

Running on postgresql i connected as admin to jiradb and just changed table entries of user 'person x' to my name 'cmadmin':

jiradb=> update jiraaction set author = 'cmadmin' where author = 'person x';

Strangely it only worked using no capitals in user name but when running jiradb=> select * from  jiraaction; thats logical.

Now you can use "user manager -> delete" to delete this user.

If this is still not working due to user being assign to a ticket or being reporter of a ticket, i have used sql search: assignee = 'person x' or reporter = 'person x' to bulkchange these issues ( change assignee -> cmadin , reporter -> cmadmin ).