How to fix phpMyAdmin error ‘Incorrect Format Parameter’

Pexels (modified)

phpMyAdmin is a free software tool to manage MySQL databases.

Sometimes when importing a database to phpMyAdmin, the error ‘Incorrect Format Parameter’ appears.

Error when trying to import a large database

This is because the database you are trying to import is larger than the size indicated in the PHP configuration. Let’s see how to fix it.

You have two options to avoid this error in phpMyAdmin:

1. Compress the database. If you are trying to import a .sql file, compress it as a .zip one, and try again.

2. Modify the values of the PHP configuration so that it allows you to upload larger files. Specifically these two values:

upload_max_filesize=100M
post_max_size=100M

You must look for these two values in the php.ini file in your server and after modifying and saving the changes, you must restart the Apache service.

With these two options we manage to solve the error ‘Incorrect Format Parameter’ in phpMyAdmin.