How is data compression more effective than indexing for search performance?

Question

For our application, we keep large amounts of data indexed by three integer columns (source, type and time). Loading significant chunks of that data can take some time and w

Answer 1

I made a similar discovery when working within Python on a database: the cost of accessing a disk is very, very high. It turned out to be much faster (ie nearly two orders of magnitude) to request a whole chunk of data and iterate through it in python than it was to create seven queries that were narrower. (One per day in question for the data)

It blew out even further when I was getting hourly data. 24x7 lots of queries it lots!