Abstract: A system and method for compressing and decompressing multiple types of character data. The system and method employ multiple encoding tables, each designed for encoding a subset of character data, such as numeric data, uppercase letters, lowercase letters, Latin, or UNICODE data, to perform compressions and decompression of character data. The character encoding tables are smaller than the size of the alphabet of the uncompressed strings.

Abstract: A method, apparatus, and article of manufacture for accessing data in a computer system. One or more user-defined functions (UDFs) implementing a desired compression or decompression algorithm are created, wherein the UDFs are associated with one or more columns of a table when the table is created or altered, in order to perform compression or decompression of data stored in the associated columns, such that the data is compressed by the UDF implementing the desired compression algorithm when the data is inserted or updated in the table, and the data is decompressed by the UDF implementing the desired decompression algorithm when the data is retrieved from the table.