Reclaiming Space from Deleted Big Tables from MySQL

So, in my earlier post, I mentioned about a need of dynamically resizing (increasing) EBS volume on EC2. Here is how I landed in the situation. In the prototype, my database grew very high and I could not reclaim the innodb space of mysql even after dropping large tables or even database. The ibdata1 seems to be greedy and never gives up. And there must be a good technical reason why mysql does not support an utility to release unused space.

Any how, here are the steps for reclaiming the space. Disclaimer: As you know I am not a DBA but I have to do what I have to do:

1. Take a sqldump of entire db 2

2. Shutdown mysql

3. delete (filesystem) ibdata1, ib_logfile0 and 1

4. Edit my.cnf (/etc/my.cnf) : add: innodb_file_per_table
    With this param, table data would be in separate files and only metadata will reside in ibdata1

5. Start mysqld

6. Reload the data dump.