I am a newbie to MySQL but I have searched these forums and various other places around the net and can't find the answer to my problem.
I have a small development database in MySQL 5.0 using InnoDB engine. At one time one of my tables had a large amount of data in it. It now has less than 5000 records. My problem is that my /data/ibdata1 file is 2.5 GIG in size!
I have since checked the "one file per table" in MySQL administrator and then "Optimized Table" (under the Maintenance Menu in MySQL administrator. This created what seems to be appropriately sized .IBD files in the database subdirectory ("/data/mydbname/mytable.IBD").
This has increased the hard drive space the database consumed because the /data/ibdata1 file is still 2.5 GIG!
More searching turned up this thread
http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?22,47517,52798#msg-52798
That states "The only way is to shrink that tablespace is to dump your tables and recreate the whole InnoDB installation."
Does this mean I need to backup my database, uninstall MySQL, reinstall MySQL, import my database?
Is there a better engine choice than innodb that does a better job at disk management?