Grouper Users - Open Discussion List

[Rory Larson <>]

Hello,

We are encountering an issue of our Grouper database growing to a size that 
threatens to use up the entire hard drive space available.  The database 
server is a physical machine with no room to expand, running a MySQL-type 
database (5.5.56-MariaDB MariaDB Server).

The problem is not so much the size of the group data itself, but with 
point-in-time tables that record what that data was back to the beginning of 
the Grouper installation.  Some of these have grown to huge sizes, on the 
order of 20 GB or so.  A suggestion has been made that we could delete a lot 
of this prior to some reasonable point in time, especially groups or 
memberships that no longer exist.  This would be fine, but I'm wondering if 
this can be done from the database command line on a per-table basis, or 
whether there are dependencies that require doing this through gsh function 
calls?

Also, because this is a MySQL-type database, shrinking the database physical 
size after deletion of unnecessary data is not trivial.  OPTIMIZE TABLE ... 
might work, or it might make a table bigger.  ALTER TABLE ... ROW 
FORMAT=COMPRESSED is promising as tried on our test database, but takes about 
four times as long as OPTIMIZE TABLE.  In either case, updating has to be 
shut down while running them, and they may require duplicating the table 
during the operation.  We are at 90% now, and can't afford any more big 
tables.  The ultimate MySQL solution seems to be to dump the database, delete 
the whole thing, and reload it, which would mean complete downtime for 
Grouper.

Does anyone else using a MySQL-type database have a system for handling this 
problem and maintaining a reasonable database size?

Thanks,
Rory