It felt like the right time for us to look back at some useful commands for table maintenance that some of us may not have mastered as much as we might like to think.

In my post about gathering index statistics, I referred to OPTIMIZE TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, and REPAIR TABLE — but I never explained in depth what the different commands do, and what the differences between them are. That is what I thought I would do with this post, focusing on InnoDB and MyISAM, and the differences in how they treat those commands. I will also look at different cases and see which one is right for in each case.

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Have you ever heard the one about throwing hardware at a software problem? In one of my previous blog posts, I mentioned something along the lines of?well I’ll just cut and paste . . . In my experience, the solution to most problems (the ones the caller refers to as “it’s running slow”) are not rooted in [...]