Re: tablespace size on windows platform

[James Day]

It's not really necessary if you have a sufficient budget. You can use a slave, do that on the slave, then switch master and do it on the former master. If you do it on a single machine you can sometimes free the fragmented space in a single table to the tablespace by using alter table engine=innodb; without excessive pain because transactions will wait. That is not practical for larger tables which must be continuously available. If you need to reduce the size of the tablespace itself you're left with the dump and reload option.