Thanks for the suggestion.
I use ActivePerl on Widows and IO::Compress::Xz is not in PPM. I tried to install it from the cpan shell but running the script fails with Can't locate auto/Compress/Raw/Lzma/autosplit.ix in @INC. Maybe I will try to get the module installed in a linux VM and see how it performs.
I do have IO::Compress::Zip so I tried that but the compressed db was much larger than the an uncompressed one with the same data... It's starting to look like I'm in a dead end.
Again, I think the compression is failing this badly because each column in each record is compressed separately by the FTS engine and I have text here in small chunks (sentences). But I don't think it would be feasible to structure the db differently because of the way the data is used (you search for a term or phrase and the program shows you each sentence that it occurs in, along with its translation in a different language).

In reply to Re^6: How do I read from a compressed SQLite FTS4 database with DBD::SQLite? by elef
in thread How do I read from a compressed SQLite FTS4 database with DBD::SQLite? by elef

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