Help talk:Reduce size of the database

Is it possible to easily flush all old revisions by cleaning out the "old" table, much like cleaning the archive table to flush deleted pages?

I assume refreshlinks.php should be carried out after that. What else should be done?

Not that this should be done regularly but MySQL data space is relatively expensive for some people.

Running scripts without shell access

How can the maintenance scripts be run without shell access? My host doesn't allow me that privilage (I can't speak for others but I'm sure this can't be unusual). In order to get around this I hack the files to allow me to run them, but this is far from ideal and I'm sure could cause many problems. As I have a tiny site I simply took it down for 5 mins. What about a 'real' solution?

Hi, can you please post what needs to be changed in the maintenance files so they can be called from the web? That would be great since I have no shell/ssh access either !!

Yes, that would be a fine feature. An alternative can be to provide sql files which do the jobs (phpmyadmin).

Purging deleted pages

The documentation states that "Beginning on MediaWiki 1.5, the content of the pages remains in the text table". This implies that truncating the archive table will not cause that data to be deleted. How can I purge that data?