Very often, database performance is affected by the inability to
cache all the required data in memory. Disk IO, even when using
the fastest devices, takes much more time than a memory access.
With MySQL/InnoDB, the main memory cache is the InnoDB buffer
pool. There are many strategies we can try to fit as much data as
possible in the buffer pool, and one of them is data compression.
With regular MySQL, to compress InnoDB data you can either use
“Barracuda page compression” or “transparent page compression
with punch holes”. The use of the ZFS filesystem is another
possibility, but it is external to MySQL and doesn’t help with
caching. All these solutions are transparent, but often they also
have performance and management implications. If you are using
Percona Server for MySQL, you have yet another option, “column …
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