Caring for your database

The database containing your site's data is the single most important piece of your site. It contains all of the configuration options you have put into your site, as well as the countless hours of work completed by your students. In short, it needs to be treated with care. Taking care of your database ensures that your site will run smoothly over time.

As you use your site, your database tables will benefit from optimization. This step, although not technically necessary in most cases, can help prevent errors over time. Optimizing tables can be compared to giving a car a tune-up, or with defragmenting a computer's hard drive.

Table optimization can be automated by using the DB Maintenance module, which can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/db_maintenance. Download and install this module as described in Chapter 3, Getting Started.

Automating table optimization using DB maintenance

The DB maintenance module provides several options for optimizing your database...