>I come up with the vague recollection that compression
>on the wire is done by the transport mechanism.

I'm not talking about compression on the wire though...

In my view removing whitespace is different than compression. Especially
since in InterBase it isn't "white". I noticed that with VARCHAR columns
that if I use a random fill pattern in the unused bytes that they come back
verbatim. This was my first clue that InterBase was not trimming whitespace
out of the network packets.

I would also like to argue that these are two different issues because when
InterBase is populating packets to send over the wire it knows nothing about
what hardware or software compression is performed and as such it cuts off
the packet's fill point at a fixed packet size boundry. It isn't able to
overstuff a packet to 80K knowing that compression algorithm X is being used
in order to get it down to the 64K size.

My argument is if whitespace is suppressed then there simply would be more
records packaged up per network packet regardless of the external
compression taking place. I think this would potentially give InterBase
query performance a huge performance boost. Especially on low banswidth
connections.

HTH,
Jason Wharton
CPS - Mesa AZ
http://www.ibobjects.com

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