We have a large MyISAM table that is used to archive old data. This archiving is performed every month, and except from these occasions data is never written to the table. Is there anyway to “tell” MySQL that this table is read-only, so that MySQL might optimize the performance of reads from this table? I’ve looked at the MEMORY storage engine, but the problem is that this table is so large that it would take a large portion of the servers memory, which I don’t want.
Hope my question is clear enough, I’m a novice when it comes to db administration so any input or suggestions are welcome.
Yes, you can compress the myisam tables.
Here is the doc from 5.0 : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myisampack.html