ARCHIVE-ing Data in MySQL
Over time, there comes a point where you have to make certain choices as a DBA in order to maintain the integrity and efficiency of your database system. In a fair amount of systems, there is information that needs to be archived away, possibly compressed, and then used to do a few lookups on when needed.
In the past, you could compress MyISAM tables, however, this required you to take your MySQL server offline to perform the compression. However, starting with MySQL 4.1.3, there is the new ARCHIVE engine. You can find out if your MySQL distribution support the ARCHIVE format by running the following query:
Add comment February 16th, 2006