Merging Archive tables with MyISAM tables

[Kayra Otaner]

Hello,

I assume this will going to be requested alot. It seems like currently there is no way to merge 2 tables unless they're both MyISAM tables. There are obvious benefits of using Archive table and Merge table types on certain circumstances. I think it is good to have the ability to use Archive engine to store historical data and use it in a union with another table type, say InnoDB.

- Why this wasn't impletemented at first place is the question I'm willing to ask :-) Should we expect this or similar improvements with 5.1?
- Also gunzipping ARZ (archive) files seems like producing enormously huge output file, although data stored inside archive engine is not that big. I have converted a MyISAM table of size 300MB to Archive and it became 40M file. Just to experiment how much space it saves, I uncompressed it it became 1G file. Is this because there are index like meta data in the table format to provide better query performance?

Thanks

Kayra Otaner