MySQL InnoDB engine based databases support compression of table data using zlib compression algorithm.
From the official documentation, it is quite easy to create or alter a table to support compression! It of course helps quite a bit with column’s you might plan to use which contain a lot of text (using the TEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, LONGTEXT column formats).
Here is how I altered my table using phpmyadmin (since I didn’t see an obvious place in the GUI to do it, I just ran the following SQL statements on the DB):
SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;# MySQL returned an empty result set (i.e. zero rows).
SET GLOBAL innodb_file_format=Barracuda;# MySQL returned an empty result set (i.e. zero rows).
ALTER TABLE herpderp
ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;# MySQL returned an empty result set (i.e. zero rows).
As you can see, after clicking Go, I got the commented text saying things seem to be successfull:)
