Question

I have a table ‘text’ initially create with the following script:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `text` (
  `old_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `old_text` mediumblob NOT NULL,
  `old_flags` tinyblob NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`old_id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 MAX_ROWS=10000000 AVG_ROW_LENGTH=10240 AUTO_INCREMENT=8500 ;

I would like to compress it.
I tried the following script for this:

ALTER TABLE text ENGINE=InnoDB ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=4;

But the table requires the same disc space after I ran it (I use innodb_file_per_table).

Initially idea appear after using archived to compress backup of tables – compressed size is 2% of original size.

How to perform compression of InnoDB table which reduces disc size required?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Compression does not affect already used space, so the best way to reduce size of all data is to delete the db server data, create tables again using ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED and load the data from backup.

I can prove that works, have tested myself.

All neccessary steps are listed here:
http://code.openark.org/blog/mysql/upgrading-to-barracuda-getting-rid-of-huge-ibdata1-file