Shrink Database

Question

I am looking at a Less than busy client on their database size

I get the following:

+-----------------------------------------------+------------+
| Tables                                        | Size in MB |
+-----------------------------------------------+------------+
| catalog_product_index_price_cl                |    3057.00 |
| cataloginventory_stock_status_cl              |    1974.00 |
| catalogsearch_fulltext_cl                     |     101.64 |
| catalog_product_flat_cl                       |     100.64 |
| catalog_category_product_index_cl             |      37.58 |
| sales_flat_order_item                         |      29.34 |
| catalog_product_index_price                   |      16.58 |
| customer_entity_varchar                       |      14.09 |
| catalog_product_index_price_idx               |      12.06 |
| catalog_product_entity_varchar                |      10.58 |
| index_event                                   |      10.03 |
| customer_entity_int                           |       6.61 |
| catalog_product_entity_decimal                |       6.55 |
| catalog_product_entity_int                    |       5.45 |
| catalog_product_entity_datetime               |       5.36 |
| catalogsearch_fulltext                        |       4.80 |
| region_city                                   |       4.52 |

Which I find kind of shocking. Why would the price index be 3gb? This is the dev database, can I safely shrink it?

Answer 1

The *_cl tables are the changelog tables. They log all the IDs of products,stock, etc. which are changed.

A cronjob should theoretically update the indexes (async indexer) and then delete the entries from the table.