Most databases have an important characteristic: they constantly grow. Usually, this means that they become more useful for the users. But this also causes problems to the DBA. This chapter covers an important feature that can sometimes be used to reduce the size of physical files: InnoDB table compression.

InnoDB allows the user to compress InnoDB tables using SQL commands. No external tool is needed. InnoDB compressed tables can still be read and written, just like uncompressed tables. As will be explained in this chapter, this may or may not improve the performance of the queries. It is, however, an important feature to focus on if our data needs too much disk space.

The following sections will be covered in this chapter: