Integration into file formats.
Integration into file formats.
Posted Jan 15, 2026 2:48 UTC (Thu) by jepsis (subscriber, #130218)In reply to: Integration into file formats. by jepsis
Parent article: Format-specific compression with OpenZL
Automatic decompression for such a file format is easy. Compression is the hard part. To write efficient representation you need clear intent i.e. how the data is expected to be used (streaming, random access, read-heavy, write-heavy), what the lifecycle looks like (archival or live data or if recompression is expected), and how the data is structured internally (schema, value distributions, chunking and ordering). Without this information any attempt to choose compression automatically is mostly guesswork and likely ends up with suboptimal result.
