A recurring and very common customer issue seen here at the Percona Support team involves how to make the ibdata1 file “shrink” within MySQL. I can only imagine there’s a degree of regret by some of the InnoDB architects on their design decisions regarding disk-space management by the shared tablespace* because this has been a big frustration for many MySQL users over the years.

There’s a very old bug (“InnoDB ibdata1 never shrinks after data is removed,” Sept. 8 2003) documenting user dissatisfaction. Shortly before that issue celebrated its 10th anniversary, James Day, MySQL senior principal support engineer at Oracle, posted a comment explaining why things haven’t changed and he also offered possible alternative solutions. Maybe we’ll …

A recurring and very common customer issue seen here at the Percona Support team involves how to make the ibdata1 file “shrink” within MySQL. I can only imagine there’s a degree of regret by some of the InnoDB architects on their design decisions regarding disk-space management by the shared tablespace* because this has been a big frustration for many MySQL users over the years.

There’s a very old bug (“InnoDB ibdata1 never shrinks after data is removed,” Sept. 8 2003) documenting user dissatisfaction. Shortly before that issue celebrated its 10th anniversary, James Day, MySQL senior principal support engineer at Oracle, posted a comment explaining why things haven’t changed and he also offered possible alternative solutions. Maybe we’ll …