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Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Just more of an observation regarding SQLite Databases, it seems that they grow but do not shrink again. Is there some kind of 'compress database' thing you could manually force to free the unused space.

This I noticed when playing around with various settings - like I tried making an extra long command to see if I could break it by having (say) a 200kb #alias ... when I deleted the alias later, the file was still >200kb in size, and if you opened it up in a hex editor you could see the alias still sitting there.

This is by no means a priority, just something which probably should be looked into in due course, especially when we start relying on it for more dynamic things.

Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 12:28 am

I use a 3rd party admin tool to do this. My current favorite is:

http://sqliteadmin.orbmu2k.de/

Another one is:

http://kraslabs.com/sqlite_analyzer.php

The first one is free.

Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 1:04 am

Using a third party tool to compact the db is not something you're average mudder would want to be playing about with. As Rainchild says it's not that important now but definitely something that should be available later on.

Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 1:49 am

I'm not sure your "average mudder" will even care. Disk space is cheap these days, so I don't think it matters to most people that their database is growing. I'm sure it is marking records as deleted and then reusing the space as it can, so it's not going to grow without bounds. 200kb is still really small. The MUD list, for example, is several megabytes.

In any case, I doubt I'll do much about this. Compressing a SQLite database essentially requires creating a fresh database and copying all of the record across. Might be something I do someday, but since I doubt the average mudder even cares, I'm guessing that the people who do care will find utilities that already do this.

Wizard Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 1113 Location: USA

I care about the size of my files because I back them up to network shares with limited space available. I'd prefer to not have to download a third party admin tool to compress them, though I understand that it wouldn't be a high priority addition to CMUD.

With the size of my scripts and the frequency with which I update them and re-import them, I'll be taking notice now of how this affects my package file sizes.