to much fragmentation

[David Johnson]

We have five big tables with blobs in them that get fragmented very fast.
We have to stop out (24 X 7) operation to defrag them too frequently (one a
week).  It seems that the fragmentation happens so fast because MySQL tries
very hard not to waste space.  For instance, we had one table that had 6.75
Blocks/Record but only had 1% lost space.

We'd love if we could tell  MySQL to use 2Gig for the table and populate it
sparsely, rather than trying
so hard to save space.  Is this possible?  Do we need to hack the source?


DJ