We examine five techniques for data compression in this chapter. The first three are simple encoding techniques, called: run-length, Huffman, and delta encoding. The last two are elaborate procedures ...

Even if you use another compression algorithm, changing your data to be mostly zeros is going to help the compressor. There are a few caveats, though.

Typically, those systems are closely guarded secrets, but today, Microsoft open sourced the algorithm, hardware specification and Verilog source code for how it compresses data in its Azure cloud.

Microsoft is contributing that algorithm, known as "Project Zipline," plus the associated hardware design specs and related source code to the Open Compute Project, the company announced on March 14.

For instance, Genie implements the MPEG-G standard in an open-source environment, achieving state-of-the-art compression ratios and enabling seamless data exchange among diverse decoding systems [3].