I wonder how much longer the ARCHIVE storage engine is going to ship with MySQL…. I think I’m the last person to actually fix a bug in it, and that was, well, a good number of years ago now. It was created to solve a simple problem: write once read hardly ever. Useful for logs and the like. A zlib stream of rows in a file.
You can actually easily beat ARCHIVE for INSERT speed with a non-indexed MyISAM table, and with things like TokuDB around you can probably get pretty close to compression while at the same time having these things known as “indexes”.
ARCHIVE for a long time held this niche though and was widely and quietly used (and likely still is). It has the great benefit of being fairly lightweight – it’s only about 2500 lines of code (1130 if
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