OPTIMIZE [LOCAL | NO_WRITE_TO_BINLOG] TABLE tbl_name[,tbl_name]...

OPTIMIZE TABLE should be used if you have deleted a large part of a table or if you have made many changes to a table with variable-length rows (tables that have VARCHAR, BLOB, or TEXT columns). Deleted records are maintained in a linked list and subsequent INSERT operations reuse old record positions. You can use OPTIMIZE TABLE to reclaim the unused space and to defragment the datafile.

In most setups you don't have to run OPTIMIZE TABLE at all. Even if you do a lot of updates to variable length rows it's not likely that you need to do this more than once a month/week and only on certain tables.

For the moment, OPTIMIZE TABLE works only on MyISAM and BDB tables. For BDB tables, OPTIMIZE TABLE is currently mapped to ANALYZE TABLE. See section 13.5.2.1 ANALYZE TABLE Syntax.

You can get OPTIMIZE TABLE to work on other table types by starting mysqld with --skip-new or --safe-mode, but in this case OPTIMIZE TABLE is just mapped to ALTER TABLE.

OPTIMIZE TABLE works the following way:

* If the table has deleted or split rows, repair the table.
* If the index pages are not sorted, sort them.
* If the statistics are not up to date (and the repair couldn't be done by sorting the index), update them.

Note that the table is locked during the time OPTIMIZE TABLE is running!

Before MySQL 4.1.1, OPTIMIZE commands are not written to the binary log. Since MySQL 4.1.1 they are written to the binary log unless the optional NO_WRITE_TO_BINLOG keyword (or its alias LOCAL) was used.

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