If you had to guess the highest priorities of database designers, the ability to compress data would probably be high on your list. The more you can compress your data, the more of it fits on your disk – seems pretty essential. But you may have noticed that most of the popular database engines offer little or no data compression features out of the box. RavenDB is an odd duck in that regard. Why is that?

The usefulness and efficiency of compressing data are very dependent on circumstances. For one thing, data storage space isn’t usually a limiting factor for most applications. The speed of the database often is.