Purge bloated tables, Magneto

Magentos MySQL database structure is pretty complex. This is great becasue there's so much potential and functionality, One downside is that Magento uses some databse tables to collect and store cached data.

If your site is getting a decent amount of traffic then you could have some databse tables that are getting pretty bloated and ultimatly slowing your site down.

Heres how you can purge these bloated database table, I reccomend you do this prior to dumping your database, its be much faster and require less server resourses.

Log into your server via putty or terminal.

then enter the MySQL promt by using

mysql -u USER -p

replace USER with the user name database user that has permissions to delete database rows.

Then the users password will be asked for, enter that and then use the command

use DATABASE_NAME

replace DATABASE_NAME with the actual name of the database you would like to work on.

Then enter

TRUNCATE `log_url_info`;
TRUNCATE `log_visitor_info`;
TRUNCATE `log_visitor`;
TRUNCATE `log_url`;
TRUNCATE `report_event`;
TRUNCATE `dataflow_batch_import`;
TRUNCATE `dataflow_batch_export`;

these will truncate the bloated tables, your now ready to dump or backup your database.