Database Compression

[dioxide]

My PGO database is about 750 megabytes right now, and it's only going to grow.  

Are there any plans for adding db compression?  If so, can you please please leave a method of uncompressing it back to a standard access db?

And a tip for others with large databases;

 If you use Win2k or WinXP, and your filesystem is NTFS, you can enable compression on your partition.  If you don't allow it to compress * across the partition, it will not slow down your pc at all.  I enabled it, forced it to uncompress the few things it compresses automatically, and manually told it to keep the pgo db compressed.

This saved me roughly half the space the db would otherwise take, it went from 750mb to about 325mb.
It definitely isn't the highest compression, but saving 425 megs with no hit to my computers speed can't be complained about.

If you make backups of your database, 7zip using the PPMd  method will give the best compression as well as taking about 1/10th the time to compress.
The drawback to that is that it takes just as long to decompress as it did to compress it.  But it's a backup, who cares.
Using that method, I was able to shrink my db from 750 megs to 44 megs.

If anyone wants to make use of these ideas, but I didnt explain it well enough, feel free to contact me. (reply here and we'll figure something out i guess)

-tommy

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Tommy,

There are no plans to introduce db compression. One thing that might happen in the future is the option to remove the HTML from posts & just store the text. That would reduce db size by about 90%.

Cheers,

Wilson.