CompressedTextField for Django & MySQL is released!

Jul 07, 2022 – Filed as: Software70

I’m proud to release django-mysql-compressed-fields: a new library that provides a compressed version of Django’s TextField for use with a MySQL 1 database! This is the first library from TechSmart to be open-sourced. 🎉

In particular you can replace a TextField or CharField like:

from django.db import models

class ProjectTextFile(models.Model):
    content = models.TextField(blank=True)

with:

from django.db import models
from mysql_compressed_fields import CompressedTextField

class ProjectTextFile(models.Model):
    content = CompressedTextField(blank=True)

such that the text value of the field is actually compressed in the database.

String-based lookups are supported:

html_files = ProjectTextFile.objects.filter(content__contains='<html')
html_files = ProjectTextFile.objects.filter(content__startswith='<!DOCTYPE')
html_files = ProjectTextFile.objects.filter(content__endswith='</html>')
empty_html_files = ProjectTextFile.objects.filter(content__in=['', '<html></html>'])

Advanced manipulations with MySQL’s COMPRESS(), UNCOMPRESS(), and UNCOMPRESSED_LENGTH() functions are also supported:

from django.db.models import F
from mysql_compressed_fields import UncompressedLength

files = ProjectTextFile.objects.only('id').annotate(
    content_length=UncompressedLength(F('content'))
)

For more information, including how to migrate to use CompressedTextField, please see the documentation.

  1. My understanding is that the Postgres database - another database type that works well with Django - transparently compresses all text fields automatically, so a library like this one wouldn’t be useful for users of that database.↩