Snappy
Snappy is the high-speed compression algorithm developed by Google, aiming not for ratio but for extreme speed (GB/s class); it is widely used in Bigtable and Protobuf.
Purpose
It provides fast compression where the ratio matters less than latency, such as columnar storage and RPC.
Mechanism
It is an LZ77 variant with simple greedy matching plus a hash table and no entropy coding stage, outputting a variable-length (literal length, match length, distance) format. Decoding is pure copying and extremely fast.
Use cases
- Bigtable/SSTable compression
- Large Protobuf fields
- Columnar storage page compression