is automating mysqlcheck safe?

[mikegpitt]

I have a database that receives frequent inserts and deletes each day. I'm thinking about tuning the performance by automating mysqlcheck each evening. I've seen some blogs suggest running the following via a cron each night `mysqlcheck --auto-repair --optimize -u root -p <database_name>`.

Is it safe to let mysqlcheck do this each evening? Can the optimize or auto-repair flags ever cause the database to enter a locked state or cause data corruption?

I do run nightly backups of the database, but it would be a bad morning to find that everything broke as I slept.