Cleaning/Shrinking my Database

[Black Six]

I'm attempting to reclaim some disk space on my server and the biggest single chunk of disk use is my forum database. I've been using Invision software for quite a while and feel like there are probably tables and entries that are no longer used or needed. Is there a recommended process for weeding these out or otherwise cleaning up the database? Is there a list somewhere of the tables that I should expect to find that I can compare to what is actually there to help determine if there are ones that can be safely removed?

[Jim M]

To get an understanding of the core database architecture, you can perform a test installation and compare your database to that. I'm afraid, we do not have a listing of current tables.

I say "core", as if you are utilizing any third party add-ons, these could mean that you have more tables than just the core.

While you did not explicitly ask this, we would never recommend deleting actual data, like forum posts for an example, in a case where your database is growing outside of your hosting's limit. Often this comes up from clients and it puts you in a situation where you will be forever chasing your tail and potentially compromising your community. For that reason, we always recommend moving plans or providers (if you can).

[Black Six]

21 hours ago, Jim M said:

To get an understanding of the core database architecture, you can perform a test installation and compare your database to that. I'm afraid, we do not have a listing of current tables.

I say "core", as if you are utilizing any third party add-ons, these could mean that you have more tables than just the core.

While you did not explicitly ask this, we would never recommend deleting actual data, like forum posts for an example, in a case where your database is growing outside of your hosting's limit. Often this comes up from clients and it puts you in a situation where you will be forever chasing your tail and potentially compromising your community. For that reason, we always recommend moving plans or providers (if you can).

Thanks for the suggestion. I unfortunately don't think a test installation would help as I'm a couple of versions behind currently, so there's a chance not everything would match. I'm trying to do this cleaning prior to upgrading.

In looking through all of the tables, there are a large number that have 'orig' prefixes, i.e. 'orig_ibf_blog_blogs' in addition to 'ibf_blog_blogs' being present. All of the 'orig' tables also have a last updated time of NULL in my database's information_schema table. Would this indicate that they are old tables that are no longer used?

Thanks again!

[Jim M]

16 minutes ago, Black Six said:

In looking through all of the tables, there are a large number that have 'orig' prefixes, i.e. 'orig_ibf_blog_blogs' in addition to 'ibf_blog_blogs' being present. All of the 'orig' tables also have a last updated time of NULL in my database's information_schema table. Would this indicate that they are old tables that are no longer used?

To confirm, you'll want to check the conf_global.php file to check your active prefix but 'orig' prefix generally is from the UTF8 conversion and can be deleted.