Duplicate rows in meta table, any known relations in WC?

Question

I am doing a migration from very old to current wordpress/woocommerce and while investigating the data I found out that there are more than one row for a products _stock meta key. The same for other meta_keys.

I found an old discussion here https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10905

Which relations (tables) utilize multiple meta values in the meta table?

Which relations break if I delete all but one of the values?

Can I safely force a UNIQUE index?

ALTER TABLE `wp_postmeta` ADD UNIQUE (
  `post_id` ,
  `meta_key` ,
  `meta_value`
);

Answer 1

What you propose would break a lot of plugins and internals of WordPress. Post meta keys are not unique.

This is supported at the API level too:

// on save...
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'lead', 'Tom' );

add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'Bob' );
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'Janet' );
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'Alice' );
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'David' );
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'Siobhan' );
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'Mikoto' );
add_post_meta( $post_id, 'member', 'Hans' );

// on the frontend...
$lead = get_post_meta( $post_id, 'lead', true );
$members = get_post_meta( $post_id, 'member' );

echo "<p>The leader is: ".$lead."</p>";
echo "<p>Members:</p><ul>";
foreach ( $members as $member ) {
    echo "<li>".$member."</li>";
}
echo "</ul>";

Notice the third argument of get_post_meta, if true it. returns the first value found, but it false it returns all values found as an array.

It's incredibly useful for repeater fields. As a result, there may be perfectly good reasons to store multiple post meta key/value rows for a post that have the same values.

As for why WooCommerce might be storing multiple rows of the same data, you would have to ask on a WooCommerce forum or support avenue, as 3rd party plugins are offtopic. here