Compression Library and Usages

Hi,

The topic came on IRC and it might be that the later attempts at using
another library missed one of the offering, namely FastLZ. It's made for
being quick rather than minimize size, it's MIT licenced, 551 lines of
portable ansi-C code, already tested on a host of systems and compilers.

http://www.fastlz.org/
http://www.fastlz.org/compilers.htm
http://www.fastlz.org/benchmarks.htm
http://code.google.com/p/fastlz/source/browse/trunk/fastlz.c

Example call sites:
http://code.google.com/p/fastlz/source/browse/trunk/6pack.c
http://code.google.com/p/fastlz/source/browse/trunk/6unpack.c

Maybe the only drawback is that it does not seem to be well maintained
any more, so it could mean the code would have to be considered for
inclusion into the PostgreSQL tree. Still I though I'd mention the lib.

As far as the usage part is concerned, not only TOAST could benefit, but
some IRC users are talking about protocol level compression. Should this
one be fast enough and an option on the other grounds, how open to libpq
compression are we?

Regards,
--
dim