Compress

When a MySQL Slave is set-up with mysqldump you have 2 possibilities:

• You dump into a file and then load the data into the Slave with the mysql client utility.
• You dump directly into the mysql client utility.

The first possibility has the advantage that you can start the load again if it failed. You can look into the file (and do some changes if needed).
The second possibility has the advantage that you do not need disk space and that it is possibly faster. But when the load fails you have to start from …

Because we are a bit short off disk space on one of our servers I had the idea to try out the MySQL feature Data Compression for InnoDB. This feature is useful if you have tables with VARCHAR, BLOB or TEXT attributes.

To not make it not too simple our table is partitioned as well. Our table looks like this:

CREATE TABLE `history_str` (
  `itemid` mediumint(8) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `clock` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `value` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY …

Abstract: In this article we have a look at the compression options of common zipping tools and its impact on the size of the compressed files and the compression time. Further we look at the new parallel zip tools which make use of several cores.

Start with a backup first

From time to time I get into the situation where I have to compress some database files. This happens usually when I have to do some recovery work on customers systems. Our rule number 1 before starting with a recovery is: Do a file …