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| title: Use Compression |
| --- |
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| # Use Compression |
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| You can configure Apache Cloudberry to use data compression with some database features and with some utilities.Compression reduces disk usage and improves I/O across the system, however, it adds some performance overhead when compressing and decompressing data. |
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| You can configure support for data compression with these features and utilities. See the specific feature or utility for information about support for compression. |
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| - Append-optimized tables support compressing table data. See [`CREATE TABLE`](../sql-stmts/create-table.md). |
| - User-defined data types can be defined to compress data. See [`CREATE TYPE`](../sql-stmts/create-type.md). |
| - The external table protocols [`gpfdist`](../data-loading/load-data-using-gpfdist.md) ([`gpfdists`](../data-loading/load-data-using-gpfdists.md)), [s3](../data-loading/load-data-from-s3.md), and [pxf](../data-loading/load-data-using-pxf.md) support compression when accessing external data. For information about external tables, see [`CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE`](../sql-stmts/create-external-table.md). |
| - Workfiles (temporary spill files that are created when running a query that requires more memory than it is allocated) can be compressed. See the server configuration parameter `gp_workfile_compression`. |
| - The Apache Cloudberry utilities [`gpbackup`](../sys-utilities/gpbackup.md), [`gprestore`](../sys-utilities/gprestore.md), [`gpload`](../sys-utilities/gpload.md), and [`gplogfilter`](../sys-utilities/gplogfilter.md) support compression. |
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| For some compression algorithms (such as zlib) Apache Cloudberry requires software packages installed on the host system. For information about required software packages, see the [Apache Cloudberry Installation Guide](../deployment/index.md). |
