Cleaning up or pruning database

[markopolo2002]

Our database has been running since 2007 and is currently just under 600Mb in size, not particularly big by anyone's standards, but I'm curious if there is a way to clean it up and/or remove obsolete or defunct tables, etc from it. I know we can run the optimize/repair, etc, but I'm in phpMyAdmin and looking at tables that are no longer in use and wondering if it's safe enough to start removing them. Obviously, I can back them up beforehand and restore them if needed, but I'm just looking for anyone else's methods or best practices regarding cleaning up the database if possible :)
Cheers
Marko

[Grumpy]

There is this...
http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/349040-cleaning-out-old-ipb-1x-and-2x-files/

But on the db site, if it's not used, it's impact on your performance virtually unmeasurable. So, you don't need to feel heavily to clean these up. But if you do know a certain table is no longer used, you can go ahead and delete them.

As for pruning options, look into apc.

[AlexJ]

U should clean SEO tables i.e. the tables where IP.SEO stores logs, keywords visits, etc..once i cleaned that up my DB dropped down from 1GB to 600Mb.

Also don't forget error logs. For some reason my queries are much faster now.

[markopolo2002]

Thanks for the responses guys, I'll take a look at implementing some of those and let you know how I get on :smile:
Marko

+++EDIT+++
OK, just went through some of the tables in phpadmin, and cleared some old log info out, etc, nothing much but then I noticed I'm pruning the logs anyway from log management. I've pretty much left the dbase to it's own devices other than those tables I know I don't need (i.e. left over from old mods, etc) and went through the entire recount and rebuild process from the ACP then cleaned up all the caches and the site certainly does appear to be a little snappier but it remains to be seen if things stay this way - I've also disabled spider logs as this was generating over 100Mb of data in the table and I can do without that feature as I'm tracking via Google Analytics anyway so no major loss there and I'm sure it saves some resources when the likes of Bing and Google have a crawl-fest on my site :)