The search criteria would need to be refined further. We'd want to dump users that haven't posted anything since we don't want nodes floating around whose authors no longer exist -- assuming this could even happen without violating foreign key contraints. But I don't think it's uncommon that people create an account in order to ask a question, and then leave.
We'd also have to choose a somewhat arbitrary cutoff date for delinquent users; if the creation date and last-here date match but occurred last week, dropping that user would be uncalled for. More likely we'd want to look at users that haven't visited in over a year or so.
Looking at users that have never created a node, and whose creation/last-here date occurred over a year ago would (I *speculate*) result in a rather short list. We might have a few hundred users but that's a trivial amount to store in a database, unlike your situation.
As to the safety issue of altering a production system, adding and deleting entries is just normal use for a database -- it's not like we're dropping tables or changing schemas, so I truly doubt that any havoc would result.
Update: Cool link theorbtwo. That's more users than I'd expected, although compared to the number of writeups (156786, not counting Q&A presumeably), even say 5,000 or so nonparticipating users is unlikely to be a drain on the system.
In reply to Re: Database Clean up?
by djantzen
in thread Database Clean up?
by defyance
| For: | Use: | ||
| & | & | ||
| < | < | ||
| > | > | ||
| [ | [ | ||
| ] | ] |