A big -1 on having backup and optimisation stuff in core. A big +1 on putting that in contributed maintainance or database modules.
You have a point there. Maybe we should consider some convention of how, if at all, to extend apis, for example database wrappers, from contrib modules. We can see things like that being used already, although not very widespread. ---------- For example a module providing db_optimise() with a default catch all code, if possible. db_optimise_mysql() and db_optimise_pg() in other separate modules. There is merit in being able to use the api namespaces for such extensions, rather putting them in their own module naming convention. I know it is not in the SQL standards, but such a thing can be a useful extension. ---------- Cheers, Vlado