Hi,
We're upgrading a large site, opendemocracy.net, from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6. Our existing install has a lot of superfluous tables in the database from once-used modules we won't be using: ideally, we wouldn't keep these, or our old blocks, etc. This is because: (a) it'd be nice to keep the database as small as possible, (b) it'd be nice for new blocks to start at ID 1, etc., (c) as clean an install as possible should minimise any problems (for example, our crufty old install has some strange problems, e.g. not letting us create any new blocks).
All we really want to keep is our nodes (plus comments), taxonomies, files, statistics, users, path aliases, and one custom table. I've tried copying the tables that I think govern these into a fresh 4.7 install and then upgrading from this, and it appears to work. My questions are: would this work? Is it a good idea? Is there a better way to achieve some of the same goals?
PS: There's also a separate issue with our upgrade involving merging just nodes and taxonomies from a separate Drupal 5 install, but I've put that here: http://drupal.org/node/605156
Here are the tables I think are all we need to keep:
audio
audio_attach
audio_image
audio_metadata
comments
files
node
node_ACCESS ??
node_comment_statistics
node_counter
node_revisions
node_type
od_story
term_data
term_hierarchy
term_node