MySQL Compression

[Ian L]

I've done a few Google searches on this topic but haven't really found any good answers so I figured I'd ask on here:

I've got a large (710,000 row, 51MB) database that's growing every day. I'm concerned about performance and therefore size. I have one column that is a varchar(250) and has about 30%-40% duplicate data. I believe I could shave a lot of size off this database with some sort of column based compression. Is there any way to do this with a MySQL command? If not, would it buy me any speed or database size reduction to write a PHP script to go through the database, find duplicates in that column, create a key (such as 1,2,3 ect...), replace the duplicate values with that key, and make a new database with the key relations?