Is it a common thing for bigger applications and databases to GZIP text data before inserting it to the database?

I'll guess that any full-text search on the actual text field will not be working before unzipping it again?

解决方案

I've not seen this done much, as it basically prevents one from doing any manipulation on the data on the MySQL-side :

no fulltext, yes

but also no like, no =, no other manipulation...

Still, if you're using your database only to store that data, and not manipulate it, it might be interesting.

Note : you might want to do a few benchmarks, to measure the performance-impact this could have, as compression/decompression requires CPU !

After that, question is : will you deal with the compression on the client (PHP) side, or on the server (MySQL) side ?

In the second case, there is a COMPRESS() function, provided by MySQL, that might interest you.