Archived best idea?

[Nicollette Marquez]

Hello.

I have a merge table (MYISAM) that houses 14 million records and is getting out of hand for data size. The data is only used for selection purposes. I am trying to look for ways to optimize the data storage and stumbled apon the compression idea. I like it, but I am concerned with oraganization pieces for querying purposes. I am visiting the idea of just keeping the one table, compressing it, and just uncompressing it when I need to add more data. Then of coarse, re-compressing it back up once the insert is completed. However, I am unsure about using this method because of time constraints of uncompressing then re-compressing. Anyone know the performance on compressing and uncompressing a table this size?

Also, I am just learning about the Archive table type. I'm thinking this may be the optimal way to store this data, however we will be upgrading to 5.0 in a few months and most likely will not upgrade beyond that for a long while. So, I'm not sure if the bugs that the Archieve table type have will make it useless for me.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.