I apologize for troubling the list again, but I sent an email on the 5th which has so far received no response. Archived here: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/112755
Put simply, the mysqli_query function does not return a boolean value as the documentation says it should. Is this an error with mysqli_query or a problem with the documentation? Or is the OPTIMIZE TABLE query beyond the scope of standard SQL?