Question

I’m referencing this Store GZIP:ed text in mysql?.

I want to store serialized sessions in the database (they are actually stored in a memcached pool but i have this as a failsafe). I am gziping/uncompressing from php.
I want to ask the following:

1) Is this a good move? I am doing this to avoid using mediumtext as the data may be bigger than text. I think/hope i will have a lot of sessions stored there. Is it, in this case, worth to gzip? Table is MyISAM.

2) Do i need to set the encoding of the table field to binary? Or only do that if i have a complete gziped file?

3) Is serializing a bad move, should i use json_encode instead (because of the smaller size i guess)?

Thanks,

Answer 1

You should use a MEDIUMBLOB field instead of MEDIUMTEXT. BLOBs have no encoding, as they are raw byte streams.