Archive is a storage engine for the MySQL relational database management system.

The Archive engine uses a compression strategy based on the zlib library and it packs the rows using a bit header to represent nulls and removes all whitespace for character type fields.

[1] MySQL is examining index support for Archive tables in upcoming releases.

Unlike OLTP engines, it uses a "stream" format to disk with no block boundaries.

Users can use the archive_reader tool to take an online snapshot of a table and to change the characteristics of an archive file.