I have url table in mysql which has only two fields id and varchar(255) for url. There are currently more than 50 million urls there and my boss has just given my clue about the expansion of our current project which will result in more urls to be added in that url table and expected numbers are well around 150 million in the mid of the next year.
Currently database size is about 6GB so I can safely say that if things are left same way then it will cross 20GB which is not good. So, I am thinking of some solution which can reduce the disk space of url storage.
I also want to make it clear that this table is not a busy table and there are not too many queries at the momen so I am just looking to save disk space and more importantly I am looking to explore new ideas of short text compression and its storage in mysql
BUT in future that table can also be accessed heavily so its better to optimize the table well before the time come.
I worked quite a bit to change the url into numeric form and store using BIGINT but as it has limitations of 64 bits so it didn’t work out quite well. And same is the problem with BIT data type and imposes the limit of 64 bits too.
My idea behind converting to numeric form is basically as 8byte BIGINT stores 19 digits so if each digit points a character in a character set of all possible characters then it can store 19 characters in 8 bytes if all characters are ranged from 1-10 but as in real world scenario there are 52 characters of English and 10 numeric plus few symbols so its well around 100 character set. So, in worst case scenario BIGINT can still point to 6 characters and yes its not a final verdict it still needs some workout to know exactly what each digit is point to it is 10+ digit or 30+ digit or 80+ digit but you have got pretty much the idea of what I am thinking about.
One more important thing is that as url are of variable length so I am also trying to save disk space of small urls so I don’t want to give a fixed length column type.
I have also looked into some text compression algo like smaz and Huffman compression algo but not pretty much convinced because they use some sort of dictionary words but I am looking for a clean method.
And I don’t want to use binary data type because it also take too many space like varchars in bytes.
If you are looking for 128 bit integers then you can use binary(16) here 16 is bytes. And you can extend it to 64 bytes (512 bits) so it doesn’t take more space than bit data type. You can say Binary data type as an expansion of BIT data type but its string variant.
Having said that I would suggest dictionary algorithms to compress URLs and short strings but with the blend of techniques used by url shortening services like using A-Z a-z 0-9 combination of three words to replace large dictionary words and you would have more combinations available than available words 62 X 62 X 62.
Though I am not sure what level of compression you would achieve but its not a bad idea to implement url compression this way.