Add Compression Mode

[julienschmidt]

Implement connection compression

[arnehormann]

If somebody want's to work on this, here's the link to the MySQL spec.

[sjmudd]

I see this issue closed and the comment that it wasn't quicker and all connections in the pool would be affected. While I understand that there are 2 cases where I have seen the use of the compressed protocol to be beneficial:
(1) when the number of client connections to the server comes from a large number of clients and the datasets returned are very large. In this situation the network interface of the destination MySQL server can be saturated: using compression avoids that and thus increases overall throughput. Here in a specialised use case it was beneficial.
(2) when pulling a lot of data over a slow high latency (remote) connection the gain of using compression can be noticeable.
While both of these use cases may not be frequent I've seen them both benefit from using the compression option so it would seem useful to provide this to the go client if that's needed.
So allowing this option would be most useful.

[arnehormann]

@sjmudd this issue is not closed. The referenced one is (278).
But adding compression is definitely not a priority for us maintainers.

Just out of curiosity so I can better see where you're coming from:
What kind of application uses a MySQL database server accessed over a high latency network from a huge number of clients?
I'm coming from a world where the database server is next to never the api endpoint - and that's also a world where frontend and backend servers are connected with a robust and fast connection.

[sjmudd]

Sorry they are 2 different use cases. I recently built something (for me to learn go) called pstop: see github.com/sjmudd/pstop. Connecting from home via a vpn to the company servers to see example statistics showed this to be quite slow (performance_schema data can be quite large and my link was due to tunneling etc) quite slow. Here I think the reduction in the data sent to the client would speed up the end resulting query times. This is one example.

The other example is on a normal network: a cluster of dedicated processing clients collecting information from a cluster of db servers are very aggressive in the data they pull out and the result sets are very large (a lot of processing happens on the client to off-load the database servers some of the work). Here it has been observed that the 1Gb network link was saturated sometimes and this thus triggered tcp back off and thus extra delays. Enabling the compression algorithm on this cluster of boxes allowed the network bandwidth to drop (yes there was likely to be a small extra overhead in using compression) but the gain as the network link was not saturated was definitely worth it. For this cluster in particular the application explicitly allows compression and benefits from it (as a whole).

I guess I was hoping the option would be there. There is no explicit comment in the documentation I am aware of that this is not available so I had to hunt around and finally found this issue which explains this has not been implemented yet. I understand your reasoning, but given I have seen a real use case where compression was helpful, thought it might be worthwhile to mention it.

I hope that clarifies my previous post?