Efficient way to store html element in sql

Question

I'm saving contents of a particular div in mysql database as html elements. So the html elements content includes many elements such as:

<div id="div0" class="box" style="z-index: 2; width: 1689px; height: 1013px;">
   <img style="margin: 0px; position: relative; display: block; height: 550px; width: 638px; top: 0px; left: 0px;">
</div>

Is there any way to reduce the data for efficiently storing in mysql database.

Such as any php or javascript functions to compress before saving to db.

Answer 1

Why compress? Disk space is cheap, and storing it in a compressed (e.g. gzip) format will just cost you CPU time to decompress/recompress each time.

As well, once you compress the data, it becomes an opaque binary blob to the DB, and you lose any ability to search that text via substring/fulltext.

Answer 2

You could compress the string before saving it to the database using gzcompress()/gzuncompress() PHP functions or you can do it with mysql using COMPRESS()/UNCOMPRESS() in your queries - but unless you have very much data I would not recommend this.

You win some harddisk space, but you lose a lot of transparency (search, edit, convert, migrate...)