How To Quickie: Repair MySQL Tables
After a long, hard day of fetching and editing tables, MySQL can become overburdened and create overhead. This can be almost directly compared to how defragmentation occurs on a hard drive. For example, something needs to be replaced in one location but there is not enough space so part of it goes here and part goes there; discontinuous. Over time, overhead for very active tables in your database can reach high levels and the result will be something like what happened to me in March. You can ensure a healthy database by following this quick fix every once in a while.
1) Locate and login to your phpMyAdmin client. 2) Select the database and click on the name of the database (circled).
![Repair MySQL Tables in phpMyAdmin](https://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2006/05/phpmyadmin.jpg)
3) You should see all of the tables for your database.
![Repair MySQL Tables in phpMyAdmin](https://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2006/05/phpmyadmin2.jpg)
4) Select the checkboxes for each table that has an overhead value.
![Repair MySQL Tables in phpMyAdmin](https://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2006/05/phpmyadmin3.jpg)
This was only for example. Tables with an overhead value under a kilobyte aren't really anything to worry about.
5) Go to the drop-down menu with selected on the bottom and select repair. 6) If everything works out, you will see the something like the image below.
![Repair MySQL Tables in phpMyAdmin](https://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2006/05/phpmyadmin4.jpg)
7) Clicking on the database name again should show the screenshot below, with no overhead for any of the tables. That's it!
![Repair MySQL Tables in phpMyAdmin](https://turbo.paulstamatiou.com/uploads/2006/05/phpmyadmin5.jpg)