I was importing posts into wordpress and messed up. It’s not uncommon. I normally have a couple failed attempts, before I get everything zeroed in with a new csv template.

I’ve learned my lesson in the past so I always set the post author to a distinct user to easily bulk delete posts based on the post_author with sql.

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DELETE FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE post_author = 50

However, this leaves trash in the wp_postmeta table so now we just clean that up by deleting everything without a entry in wp_posts.

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DELETE FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE post_id NOT IN (
  SELECT id
  FROM wp_posts
)

Now that there is no trace of my failed attempt I can reprocess the file, hopefully successfully this time.