You’ve probably had some troubles with the shared InnoDB tablespace stored in the ibdata file. Especially when it has grown for some reasons and reached a critical size.

This behavior occurs in some cases, due to excessive rollback segments growth or during a migration from a unique shared tablespace to a file-per-table configuration for example.

In this post, I would like to explain how to shrink the ibdata file after an unwanted file growth in a file-per-table configuration.
Note that the process could be done without Trite but the tool avoids to write the script used to transport tables yourself.

Initial situation

Here is a sample of the InnoDB configuration:

innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:100M:autoextend
innodb_file_per_table

And the status of your datafiles in the datadir directory:

drwx------ 2 mysql mysql 4,0K déc. 20 2012 …

When innodb_file_per_table is OFF and all data is going to be stored in ibdata files. If you drop some tables of delete some data then there is no any other way to reclaim that unused disk space except dump/reload method.

When Innodb_file_per_table is ON, each table stores data and indexes in it’s own tablespace file. However, the shared tablespace-ibdata1 can still grow and you can check more information here about why it grows and what are the solutions.

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/08/20/why-is-the-ibdata1-file-continuously-growing-in-mysql/

Following the recent blog post from Miguel Angel Nieto titled “ …