.H 1 pzip

Fixed length record data is often viewed as a waste of space,

too sparse for production use.

Much effort is then put into optimizing

the data schema, and in the process complicating the data interface.

.B pzip

shows that in many cases this view of fixed length data is wrong.

In fact, variable length data may become more compressible when

converted to a sparse, fixed length format.

Intense semantic schema

analysis can be replaced by an automated record partition, resulting in

compression space improvements of 2 to 10 times and decompression speed

improvements of 2 to 3 times over

.B gzip

for a large class of data.