After a few days of digging, it really does seem that the data compression is probably just half-baked.

Yes, this is more of an experiment - perhaps "polishing the turd" is more apt. I have a large number of application servers with large amounts of logs from legacy applications. Without touching the application logging, I am aggregating the logs to a central database.

It is working fine. However, since our apps are not CPU-bound, I wanted to see if I received any sort of network benefit of adding compression to the mix.

This appeared to be low-hanging fruit that simply required dbiproxy configured and running and a change the DSN on the client side.

The data being sent to the DB is generally not that large, though it certainly can be - I wouldn't be surprised if the overhead of Compress::Zlib surpassed the transmission time savings, but I wanted to try it out.

I see that Tim Bunce co-wrote the book that mentioned the compression as an alternative - I'll try that route.

Thanks

Ben