SELECT...INTO can be used to store the single row column result value from a query to be used in another query depending on that value.

"accounts" table

+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field        | Type        | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+--------------+-------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| account_id   | int(11)     | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| account_name | varchar(50) | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| balance      | float       | …

This week we are talking about size, which is a subject that should matter to any system administrator in charge of the backup system of any project, and in particular database backups.

I sometimes get questions about what should be the best compression tool to apply during a particular backup system: gzip? bzip2? any other?

The testing environment

In order to test several formats and tools, I created a .csv file (comma-separated values) that was 3,700,635,579 bytes in size by transforming a recent dump of all the OpenStreetMap nodes of the European portion of Spain. It had a total of 46,741,126 rows and looked like this:

171773  38.6048402      -0.0489871      4       2012-08-25 00:37:46     12850816        472193  rubensd
171774  38.6061981      -0.0496867      2       2008-01-19 10:23:21     666916  9250 …