Skip navigation links

Additional languages
6.5.5 Setting Up a MyISAM Table Maintenance Schedule »
Section Navigation      [Toggle]

6.5.4. MyISAM Table Optimization

To coalesce fragmented rows and eliminate wasted space that results from deleting or updating rows, run myisamchk in recovery mode: 

shell> myisamchk -r tbl_name

You can optimize a table in the same way by using the OPTIMIZE TABLE SQL statement. OPTIMIZE TABLE does a table repair and a key analysis, and also sorts the index tree so that key lookups are faster. There is also no possibility of unwanted interaction between a utility and the server, because the server does all the work when you use OPTIMIZE TABLE. See Section 12.5.2.5, “OPTIMIZE TABLE Syntax”.

myisamchk has a number of other options that you can use to improve the performance of a table:

  • --analyze or -a: Perform key distribution analysis. This improves join performance by enabling the join optimizer to better choose the order in which to join the tables and which indexes it should use. To obtain information about the key

  • --sort-index or -S: Sort the index blocks. This optimizes seeks and makes table scans that use indexes faster.

  • --sort-records=index_num or -R index_num: Sort data rows according to a given index. This makes your data much more localized and may speed up range-based SELECT and ORDER BY operations that use this index. (The first time

For a full description of all available options, see Section 4.6.2, “myisamchk — MyISAM Table-Maintenance Utility”.