I got the same problem and it takes very large amount of my database.
There are 2xxx records which are similar to pilsschouler’s. I found that most of them are duplicated with same option_name & option_value. It took total about 3xMB of my DB!
I am not sure what’s going wrong and now I just delete those records and turn off the feed of dashboard. The database then becomes to less than 1MB :\
It may be a bug of WP as i aslo found some duplicated options which probably come from other plugins but they are just very small amount compared with WP’s feed.
Hope this information could help the developers to solve the problems.
