How to disable versioning in Jackrabbit?

I am working on a legacy application currently incorporating Jackrabbit 2.6, which at some point used the jackrabbit versioning (I am not even sure if it was with this or another jackrabbit version). Currently the versioning is still present in the configuration and its corresponding DB tables (*_BINVAL, *_BUNDLE, *_NAMES, *_REFS) are still there.

I would like to have the versioning disabled and completely removed as it takes up space in our database and slows down the Jackrabbit garbage collection with an empty run over the versioning persistence manager. I cannot find any information though about how to proceed with it.

Is it safe to simply remove the <Versioning>...</Versioning> tag from the xml configuration and to drop the related tables? How should I proceed?

Solution

Unfortunately, versioning is mandatory. Therefore we needed to clean as much of the version information as possible. In my case it turned out that somehow the mix:versionable mixins disappeared (probably due to changes in the custom node types and OCM), leaving the version related properties behind. What I ended up doing:

Iterate over the whole repository deleting the version history for each node (either by removing the mixin or the versioning properties in my case), saving the session after every X of changed nodes.
Close the Jackrabbit repository and rename the versioning tables (*_BINVAL, *_BUNDLE, *_NAMES, *_REFS) in the database to hide them from Jackrabbit.
Start Jackrabbit again - the tables in the database have been recreated and besides three default nodes are empty
After confirming that the repository is intact, drop the the hidden tables.

The garbage collection has become faster - we went down from two weeks to 4 hours. The version history contained millions of entries, which were completely unnecessary.