Other compression solutions

Other storage engines offer the ability to compress tables. These engines are:

• TokuDB: This engine always compresses tables; there is no way to avoid this. This is a part of its strategy, which aims to reach high performance by reducing the amount of output to disks.

• ARCHIVE: This storage engine is specifically designed for compressed tables with limited functionalities. It is possible to add new data to an ARCHIVE table, but the existing rows cannot be deleted or updated. Index support is very limited.

• MyISAM: While normal MyISAM tables are not compressed, a special tool called myisampack can be used to compress tables. A compressed MyISAM table is read only.

  Tip

  Note that while Aria aims to be a more robust and modern version of MyISAM, it does not support this feature.

Compression methods other than the InnoDB COMPRESSED row format are beyond the scope of this chapter. They are not widely used because other storage engines, including TokuDB, do not reach the performance...