How big is a vB mySQL db?

[JJR512]

I'm wondering about how big the file size is for a vB mySQL database. On my web host's servers, I can't actually see the db files, so I can't tell. But using phpMyAdmin, I backed it up by doing dumping the structure and data and sending it (to my computer). The file I got was only 22 MB. My message board had 143 members and about 43,000 posts total. I seem to remember that when I imported from UBB (with fewer posts at the time, of course), that it was a lot bigger, like maybe 75 or 100 MB.

I looked at the file with WordPad, and of course 22 MB of text is a lot to look at and I obviously couldn't check the whole thing, but I do see the first posts in there and what are probably the most recent posts. Is this normal, though, for the database file size to be so small? Does 22 MB seem right for a board of this size?

[JimF]

Yeah, 22MB sounds just about right. A text file dump of your database will give you a rough estimate of the overall size, but it doesn't account for some things that would increase the size. It is safe to assume that your database is approximately 22MB - maybe a little more.

UBB stores every thread as an HTML file, whereas vB stores the HTML for threads in the database, so it's only stored once, instead of 15,000 times. That's one major reason for the difference in size.

-jim

[JJR512]

Here is another question, not related very much, though. When I imported the UBB originally, I forget why but after the first time I deleted everything and imported again, and did it again. So now all the ID numbers, like post ID number, member ID number, etc., are all higher than they should be. Because I only deleted the info from the db, not the db itself, I guess the counters remained incremented. When I set up vB on the new web server and bring in the old db, is there any way I can reset all the ID numbers so they start counting from 1 again?

[John Harrison]

Reinstall vBulletin and then reimport UBB into it.

[JJR512]

Then it seems I would lose the few thousand posts that have been made to the board under vBulletin, hardly an acceptable solution.