So, I was setting up a daily dump of the WordPress database, when I discovered that there was about 500KB of data. What!? Seriously, that couldn’t be right. But it was.
Narrowed it down to a cached copy of three RSS feeds, stored in the administrative “options” table. Why would cached data of any RSS feeds, let alone those that are superfluous to WordPress development belong there????
Anyway, commented out the PHP lines that fetch the RSS feeds. Then manually had to remove the cached entries in the database itself. Now it compresses down under 5KB. I’m content for now.
As to why this data was stored there, or at all is still a mystery to me. But I’m a newbie; I’m not supposed to understand, right?