Post table is too big, how to reduce or split it?

[joshskeety]

It astounds me that VB hasn't thought of this yet..

I saw one VB admin just say.. "Why not move everything to an archive forum (meaning add another forum to your forum called archive)." And I was like.. REALLY? So the vb post table stays JUST as large if you do that, what have you archived? Nothing..

I actually brought this to their attention a few years ago and was basically laughed at. I had nearly a 4 gig post database that made backing up the forum impossible, made searching posts horrible, any repair to the database took HOURS. I am a Systems Engineer and EVERY system we use including just PST's have an archive or some way to relieve a database. This is typical in almost anything that uses a SQL database backend.. Why VB hasn't come up with an easy solution or why no hack has been created to do this is beyond me.

The solution is easy in my mind. Allow a connection to a SECOND database and set up a VB cron job automatically (like in the options section) to 1 in the morning, or something similar to move posts from (X) days from one database to the other. Allow the users table to access that database and use VB Search function to pull up those archives. That way you keep your main database at a minimum, backing up is a cinch, your archive you can backup like once a month MAYBE. Your MYSQL runs better, your forum runs better and repairing or optimizing your tables take 2 minutes rather than 2 hours..

Really, this is something that should of come standard on like VB version 2. The fact that there isn't even a MOD just astounds me.. My forum is pretty big and massive, but what about guys who most likely have post tables that are 20-50 Gig in size.. How do they do it?

I know my solution was to piss off all my users and deleted all our posts from 2004 until 2010.. It was a damn shame to lose all of them, my statistics got all screwed up, the users can't go back and find a post. We had 3 GREAT users who passed away and we couldn't go back to their posts..

If I knew how to code, I would have made this 7 years ago..