Lossless or lossy: If you have big data, know what type of compression to use Your email has been sent Illustration: Lisa Hornung/iStockPhoto Must-read big data coverage What Powers Your Databases?

It used to be that memory and storage space were so precious and so limited of a resource that handling nontrivial amounts of text was a serious problem. Text compression was a highly practical ...

Effective compression is about finding patterns to make data smaller without losing information. When an algorithm or model can accurately guess the next piece of data in a sequence, it shows it’s ...

Lossless compression is used for applications where the original data must be fully restored following decompression. Examples of applications requiring lossless compression include network data, ...

A compression technique that does not decompress digital data back to 100% of the original. Lossy methods can provide high degrees of compression and result in smaller compressed files, but some ...

I see awful diminishing returns here. (Lossless) compression of today isn't really that much better than products from the 80s and early 90s - stacker (wasn't it?), pkzip, tar, gz. You get maybe a few ...