MySQL provides a useful tool called “procedure analyse” that can help you optimize your tables for storage. "Procedure analyse" examines the contents of a table's columns and suggests a field type for each column selected that reduces the total table size.

So, why bother to reduce table size when storage is cheaply available? Big tables not only use up memory, but queries on them eat up CPU usage as well. If you have a web site with large custom MySQL tables and your site is on a shared server, you could end up getting penalized monetarily or even have your site shutdown by your ISP, if queries on your MySQL tables consume more CPU than allocated. To keep this from happening you should optimize both your queries and your table size. "Procedure analyse" provides a quick and easy way to do the latter.

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