Table compression

It is possible for tables to occupy less space when stored on disk by taking advantage of the table compression capabilities available in the DB2® product. Compression saves disk storage space by using fewer database pages to store data.

Also, since more logical data can be stored per page, fewer pages will need to be read in order to access the same amount of logical data. This means that compression can also result in disk I/O savings, as more data can be brought into memory or written to disk with each I/O request.

Compression can be used with both new and existing tables. It can also be used with temporary tables. To implement data compression in DB2 tables, there are two methods you can employ:

• Row compression (available with a license for the DB2 Storage Optimization Feature)
• Value compression.