How to get the sizes of the tables of a MySQL database?

Question

I can run this query to get the sizes of all tables in a MySQL database:

show table status from myDatabaseName; 

I would like some help in understanding the results. I am looking for tables with the largest sizes.

Which column should I look at?

Answer 1

You can use this query to show the size of a table (although you need to substitute the variables first):

SELECT      table_name AS `Table`,      round(((data_length + index_length) / 1024 / 1024), 2) `Size in MB`  FROM information_schema.TABLES  WHERE table_schema = "$DB_NAME"     AND table_name = "$TABLE_NAME"; 

or this query to list the size of every table in every database, largest first:

SELECT       table_schema as `Database`,       table_name AS `Table`,       round(((data_length + index_length) / 1024 / 1024), 2) `Size in MB`  FROM information_schema.TABLES  ORDER BY (data_length + index_length) DESC;