Compression Q?

[Ramin Firoozye]

Hi guys,

I have an application where users could put the entire database on a small
portable device, i.e. one of those USB keychains that behave like a
hard-disk (not sure how fast the read-times are on those). The scenario
would be that they can take the data with them on the keychain, plug it into
a USB port, run the application (enter a password), update the data right on
the keychain, then just pull it out and walk away.

Anyway, my question is: is there any sort of DB compression planned for 2.0?
Ideally, something along the lines of the plugins for encryption. These
small devices start at around 16MB and go up to 256MB, but there's BLOB data
involved and the cost of the device is an issue so data compression would be
needed (especially since most of the fields are fixed text with lots of
empty space).

The thing is, the database would have to be encrypted AND compressed. If you
lose your keychain, you don't want other being able to get access to the
data. I can use an external zip utility on an encrypted DB, but that would
mean they won't be able to use it in-place. I was looking to keep it all on
the storage device in encrypted form but taking minimal space.

Any ideas? Will there be a way to 'chain' plugins together so you can have
the data go through zip then encrypt before being written to disk? I haven't
seen anything in 1.x on this. If I missed it, I'd appreciate a pointer.

Thanks,
Ramin
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