Summary

Today you learned how to check a database for minor problems such as wasted space on this disk ranging up to more serious problems such as corruption.

You learned how to use myisamchk to check your tables and perform repairs. You studied not only the options for running myisamchk but also a strategy for attempting first simple repairs and then escalating your actions to handle more severe cases of corruption.

You saw how to reclaim wasted space among data records, and how to gain performance improvements by sorting table indexes and data records.

Finally, you studied the CHECK TABLE, REPAIR TABLE, and OPTIMIZE TABLE commands, which are SQL commands, to do the same things as myisamchk does as a command-line utility.