Database for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) application is used by almost every corporations that has adopted computerisation to support their operational day to day business. Compression in the storage or file-systems layer has not been widely adopted for OLTP database because of the concern that it might decrease database performance. OLTP compression in the database layer is available commercially but it has a significant licence cost that reduces the cost saving of compression. In this research, transparent file-system compression with LZ4, LZJB and ZLE algorithm have been tested to improve performance of OLTP application. Using Swing-bench as the benchmark tool and Oracle database 12c, The result indicated that on OLTP workload, LZJB was the most optimal compression algorithm with performance improvement up to 49% and consistent reduction of maximum response time and CPU utilisation overhead, while LZ4 was the compression with the highest compression ratio and ZLE was the compression with the lowest CPU utilisation overhead. In terms of compression ratio, LZ4 can deliver the highest compression ratio which is 5.32, followed by LZJB, 4.92; and ZLE, 1.76. Furthermore, it is found that there is indeed a risk of reduced performance and/or an increase of maximum response time.
