whats the best way to compress a date?

my site needs to store the ip and timestamp of every visit on mysql. i am concerned that very quickly i will have 1e6 rows in my database.

what is the best way to compress a date on mysql or java? does mysql already compress dates? ideally, I would like to un-compress the date values rather quickly to generate reports.

Update: sorry i meant a mil per day. but I开发者_开发百科 guess that is still minuscule.

Mate, one million rows is a tiny database. I wouldn't be worrying too much about that. In any case, MySQL uses a pretty compressed format (3 bytes) anyway as per this page:

DATE: A three-byte integer packed as DD + MM×32 + YYYY×16×32 

In other words, at bit level (based on the 1000-01-01 thru 9999-12-31 range):

00000yyy yyyyyyym mmmddddd

Use the built in MySQL datetime type. A million rows isn't that many.

A mysql timestamp would be only 4 bytes. An integer representing the timestamp would be the same. It would be efficient to save it as a mysql type since you'd be able to index and/or query based on that column efficiently.

Any "compressed" form not a mysql type would be inefficient to query.