Re: [sqlite] Compression

[amead]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hello all,
First of all, allow me to wish everyone a Happy New Year and I hope it'll be a 
good one for all.
My question is (and I've raised this topic back in September, but didn't get 
back to it since), does anyone have a free/commercial add-on for SQLite v3 to 
perform on-the-fly compression/decompression of data, preferably on a field 
level (compress just one of the fields, not the whole table)?
Thank you,
  Dennis
 

I had a file size problem so I considered this.  My googling didn't turn 
up any solutions and then, upon further thought, I decided that this 
probably wouldn't work for most applications.  I think the data would 
have to be compressed on a field basis and in that case, I think you 
would only get good compression on fairly long fields and then only if 
you didn't ever want to use those in a query.  (I have to assume that 
decompressing fields in order to find out whether they match a where 
condition would be deathly slow... I assume that it would cause a lot of 
problems with indexing as well...) 

So, under those conditions, it seems like you could move the 
compression/decompression out of SQLite and into your program...  
compress strings before you write them to the database; decompress 
strings after you're retrieved them.

I may have a need like this.  However, the original problem didn't fit 
this structure (no long strings), so I never pursued this...

-Alan
--
Alan Mead - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of
the future.