Reduce Database size I would like to reduce the size of a site's database. The reasons are as follows:


To speed up the syncing process from live to local
To hopefully speed up sql query execution time (an experiment)


I have many sections and hundreds upon hundreds of entries, all with versioning enabled. My question is, is there a way to 'trim the fat', or to put it better perhaps remove stale old version types (perhaps just keep the 5 most revisions for each entry)?

Thanks in advance for you help!
If you're specifically looking to trim the entryversions table, there is a plugin that can automate the process for you.

Beyond that, you can safely truncate these tables as well when moving between environments:

assetindexdata
assettransformindex
sessions
templatecaches
templatecachecriteria
templatecacheelements