I was ready to give up on Home Assistant... until I moved the database!

[RobDYI]

This might be worth a try to reduce your database, it worked for me.

Allow services to be excluded from Recorder: and the database

I tried to find out how to add this to the official documentation but I am unsure how. Please add to the official documentation as I think its a really important feature that will make most peoples HA run better. I would even suggest state_change only events be recorded as default.