reset table watchdog?

Recently the database of my drupal site has grown extreme:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6517561 Sep 1 02:00 backup-20040901.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6560873 Sep 2 02:00 backup-20040902.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6564653 Sep 3 02:00 backup-20040903.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6518383 Sep 4 02:00 backup-20040904.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6554220 Sep 5 02:01 backup-20040905.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6606450 Sep 6 02:00 backup-20040906.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6578862 Sep 7 02:00 backup-20040907.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6582791 Sep 8 02:00 backup-20040908.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7850475 Sep 9 02:01 backup-20040909.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9688870 Sep 10 02:01 backup-20040910.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11292948 Sep 11 02:00 backup-20040911.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12812310 Sep 12 02:01 backup-20040912.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14318106 Sep 13 02:01 backup-20040913.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15732462 Sep 14 02:01 backup-20040914.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 17279235 Sep 15 02:01 backup-20040915.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18714611 Sep 16 02:01 backup-20040916.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20238460 Sep 17 02:01 backup-20040917.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 22017487 Sep 18 02:01 backup-20040918.sql.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 24334295 Sep 19 17:28 backup-20040919.sql.gz

The Datalenght field of the watchdog table has now grown to 79404916 and is by far the biggest. It was due to a non valid feed I was asking every couple of hours. I disabled the feed and cleared the watchdog table:
DELETE FROM watchdog;.

However, what would bve a good way of stopping the growth? Something like "last message repeated 8 times"? Or having a max in bytes instead of time size? Or should watchdog write to syslog?

Any thoughts?

--
groets,

bert boerland
Unless your universe is very different
from mine, you can't save time.