Thread:Project:Support desk/Gigabytes of data taken up by MySQL database for mediawiki installation/reply (5)

Ah I was wrong (I was assuming that you had caching set up to use the objectcache table in the database and that was taking up most of the room). The text table is where all the page contents are stored (as well as old versions of pages). If you run the script maintinance/storage/compressOld.php it will compress the page histories (As well as concat some of similar versions together for better compression ratio) which will probably reduce the amount of space needed significantly. [before experimenting with compression, good idea to make a backup]

As for search index. That's for the search box to work. In theory you could set up lucene search which would move the search index out of the mysql db (and be a much better search), but the size would still probably be similar, it would just be handled by a different program.