Dear Dave:
Sometime back Engineering and I partnered on a document on database maintenance -- Database Maintenance
Deleting db tables can cause issues due to all the links to other tables. (Example, try to delete a user and see all of the tables that are touched.)
A manual but an overall faster approach is the one that I outlined in the above article
Create screenshots of the the configuration and Business Services. Do a BT export . Then create the config based on the screenshots, create the business service, import the bt. Then you won't have any "db bloat." if the import is successful. (Could test first).
Thanks
Hal German