Thanks for your reply Niraj,
I've found the following, confirmed bug which seems to affect my system:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-31879

The bad thing about this bug is, it can't be fixed autmatically in some constellations so I will have to repair the DB manually.

"The original bug in the upgrade task has been fixed. This means customers upgrading from Confluence versions lower then 5.3 to 5.4.4+ should no longer be effected by this.
However if you have previously upgraded from an older version of Confluence and are effected by this problem upgrading again to Confluence 5.4.4+ will NOT rerun the upgrade task. Therefore for customers in this situation it is still necessary to run the workaround, upgrading alone is not sufficient to fix this problem."

Cheers,
Michael

Hi michael.pfister,

Looking at the logs it sounds like Confluence is unable to delete the space because it has a page that has a notification that is referencing it. Confluence does check to see if there are notifications and automatically removes such notifications. This leads me to believe that your database might be corrupt (i.e. there are entries in the notifications table that reference content that are in the space being deleted, but the notifications table entry does not reference the space correctly) You should be able to find such rows by running a query like:

select n.notificationid, n.spaceid as notificationspace, c.spaceid as contentspace from notifications n
inner join content c on c.contentid = n.contentid
where n.spaceid <> c.spaceid;

However please make a backup before modifying or deleting them. I would recommend you create a ticket with Atlassian support so we can help you review the situation and resolve the issue. Please point them to this JIRA issue when you do.

Hope this helps,
Niraj.

I'm sorry to say but this issue still hasn't been fixed.
We are running Confluence 5.5.1 and I'm stil not able to delete any of our spaces as I'm still getting a reference constraint error (please see the attachment (conf_error20140701.txt)).

A fix would be most welcome as since this error first occured in 4.2.4 we now have several ghost spaces in our Confluence instance.

Thanks in advance for an update on this issue.

Hi Sebastian,

Is it possible for you to upgrade to Confluence 4.3.1? It's has a fix for this issue. If not, I would recommend disabling all 3rd party plugins and trying again. Those plugins are just some of the more well known ones that cause issues with space deletion in 4.3. There could be others as well.

Thanks,
Niraj.

We recently upgraded to 4.3. We used the bubbles plugin before but now none of the plugins (bubbles, descendant notification, subspace) that might cause this issue, are installed. Still we're unabel to remove/recreate personal spaces also not via the mentioned workaround. Is there any other workaround besides the https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/How+to+Manually+Delete+a+Space via a CLI?

Hi Eric,

The Confluence Bubbles plugin is by a 3rd party called Adaptavist and is not supported by Atlassian. However, I did have a look and it turns out they have released 2.0.3-beta3 which is meant to have solved the incompatibility, so it might be worth upgrading to the beta to see if that solves it.

Alternatively you can wait for Confluence 4.3.1 to be released in about a week and upgrade to that.

Cheers,
Niraj.

Disabling the community bubbles resolved the issue for us as well. Any word on an update for that plugin? It's used quite a bit here.

Thanks!!!
Eric

From Edward Lee's comment above, if you have Community Bubbles installed in your instance, try disabling the plugin, delete your space, and then enable the plugin. This is a temporary fix for my team, but does the trick for now.

Hunter

Thanks for the clarification.

Niraj,

apologies for the delay in replying. After a bit more investigation – missed the Confluence Bubbles Plugin (Adaptavist) that was installed, we've found the SubSpace plugin not to be the cause. When we disabled the Bubbles plugin, we were able to delete spaces again. Appreciate your feedback and help.

Ed