Juliano Ravasi Ferraz wrote:

Brion suggests using "DELETE FROM archive;", but I wonder if this procedure is still up-to-date for the latest development releases. It looks like that the real data are stored in `text`, and there are no database constraints to propagate deletions. Issuing this command seems to just cause a "database" leak (compared to a memory leak). Am I right?

Right.

If so, is it correct to issue something like "DELETE FROM archive, text WHERE ar_text_id = old_id;" for current MediaWiki versions? Is this secure? Or will this somehow harm database consistency?

That sounds like it will probably work, on MySQL 4 or later. (But back everything up first!)

There's not really any built-in management for discarding old data to save space; MediaWiki assumes you have a buttload of space and will get more or manually rearrange data when you need it. :)

Another question: I ran for some time with $wgCompressRevisions off, and now I want to turn it on. Ok, it will compress pages from now on, but is there a procedure to compress all old revisions already created before setting the option?

There is compressOld.php, but IIRC this code is broken on 1.5 at the moment.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)