re: gzipping the db itself - yep, I tried and saw the same effect as you did: about half a size. I think it's because of indexes (I once played with sqlite3_ana

re: gzipping the db itself - yep, I tried and saw the same effect as you did: about half a size. I think it's because of indexes (I once played with sqlite3_analyzer[1] and on some databases it showed about half of disk space was used by indexes) and unused pages (all the space which can be vacuum'ed - again, size of some databases can be decreased almost twice by vacuum'ing). [1]: https://www.sqlite.org/sqlanalyze.html https://www.sqlite.org/sqlanalyze.html On the other side, indeed, text dump is likely not the most space-efficient way of storing raw DB data (compared to some binary one), so I wouldn't be surprised to find databases for which gzipped sql dump is bigger than (gzipped) database itself. I would even say that I'm surprised that it's not true for most databases :)