Optimize Your MySQL Database Tables

3rd March 2009 - 3 minutes read time

You can optimize MySQL tables using the OPTIMIZE command. This can be used if you have a table with any variable length rows and you make lots of changes to the data in that table. Variable length columns are VARCHAR, VARBINARY, BLOB, or TEXT. The OPTIMIZE TABLE will defragment the data and reclaim any unused space. This also has the effect of resetting any auto incrementing numbers to the highest value in the table.

OPTIMIZE TABLE tbl_name;

You can do this for every table in the database, but to save time MySQL comes with a command line script that will optimize all tables in a database. This program is called mysqlcheck and can be run like this.

mysqlcheck -o database -u user -ppassword

Note that when writing this command you should not put a space in between the -p and your password.

The mysqlcheck program can also be used to check (-c/-m/-C), repair (-r) and analyze (-a) the tables in a database. These commands can be done by using the CHECK, REPAIR and ANALYZE MySQL commands.

Optimizing tables will clear out unnecessary settings and speed up your tables slightly, but there is little point in doing this more than once a month, or once a week for very high traffic MySQL servers.

MySQL

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
CAPTCHA
5 + 8 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Related Content

Solving Query Performance Problems With The MySQL Slow Query Log

21st January 2024

MySQL's slow query log is a key component in your MySQL administration setup. Whilst normal logging can help you in terms of tracking down issues with your database system, the slow query log can help you track down issues in your database setup before they become problematic.

Read more

Creating An Authentication System With PHP and MariaDB

15th October 2023

Using frameworks to handle the authentication of your PHP application is perfectly fine to do, and normally encouraged. They abstract away all of the complexity of managing users and sessions that need to work in order to allow your application to function.

Read more

Case Insensitive Like Searches In MySQL

2nd July 2011

I needed to create a query that did a case insensitive search using the LIKE command in MySQL and I quickly realised that in order to do this I would need to alter both the parameter and the table data to be the same case. This can be done by using the MySQL UPPER() command on the table data and the strtoupper() PHP function on the input data.

Read more

Connecting To A Non Standard MySQL Socket In PHP

11th February 2011

Connecting to a MySQL database in PHP is usually not a difficult thing to do, in fact it is one of the first things that many tutorials will go though. However, there are certain curcumstances that require more information than the standard host, password and username details.

Read more

Count Number Of Characters In A String With MySQL

30th September 2010

Today I needed to grab some data from a table where there was more than one occurrence of a string within another string. Basically, I needed to find all URL's from a table that were more than 3 levels deep (i.e. with 3 slashes), but realised there wasn't a function to do this in MySQL.

Read more

MySQL Order Table By Character Length

24th September 2009

As part of debugging a bit of code I needed to know the longest possible field lengths that a record contains. You might need to know this if you are performing a database migration. The following query returns a field, along with the length of the string, and orders the results by the number of characters in that string.

Read more