I’ve also looked into Vertica which looks to be a nice solution and I’m sure there are others.

Thanks for the ideas.

I agree with your comments on a production database but what % of an organization’s database storage would you consider the ‘family jewels’ vs. copies of the database for things like decision support/data warehousing, snapshots, and other copies/clones for recovery purposes?

If I can compress those supporting copies down 50-80%…why not?

The other data set where generic compression is valid is on most databases, which really still are essentially sparse alphanumeric data for the most part. The thing is, databases are also the least likely place for customers to implement compression, because this is the one area where they are least likely to trade off any performance for space savings. Companies like Storewize have very fast generic compression, and that would be a good fit for databases, but it’s not clear to me that customers are embracing compression for that, the most conservative area in the data center.

I believe they’re wrong because storage is an elastic market. Drop the price and you’ll sell more.

Not sure why you make this statement.

“For compression to have any meaningful impact on today’s data sets, you have to have file type aware recompression.”

Seems to me there are other use cases where compression could have a meaningful impact.

Don.