> On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 03:51:34PM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > i've logged into cpanel for my domain and, via phpmyadmin, So MySQL? On Sat, Apr 01, 2017 at 01:28:50PM -0400, Brenda J. Butler wrote: > I'd be careful of deleting stuff willy-nilly, for fear of causing > dangling foreign keys (or whatever the term is when you delete something > that another table references). Isn't that what foreign keys prevent… @rday: Find out what are the foreign keys between tables. See if there are any cascades and thus if you can delete some table content without it taking down things you care about with it. Make sure there aren't any weird triggers anywhere, or the like; if so, look at what they do. > > i suspect i haven't specified all the info necessary to get a > > meaningful answer to this, so any guidance would be appreciated. where > > should i start? > Of course, if you have that backup copy of the DB, you can always put the > original back and start over. But I'd be more inclined to study the > DB schema before trying to delete anything. @rday: Could you tell us which DB, then we could help you? If the interface isn't enough, you should start using some of your DBMS' introspection and aggregating functions to get a picture of where most of your storage is being used, or within each table, if there are any notable groups that you can easily delete. If it's MySQL though, your interactive shell is going to be a bit of a letdown, at least compared to Postgres' \d commands. > Or, use a wiki API if one exists to do the deletes. Probably no bulk operations? Regards, Alex Pilon