The term data compression refers to decreasing the number of bits of info which needs to be stored or transmitted. This can be achieved with or without the loss of info, so what will be deleted in the course of the compression shall be either redundant data or unnecessary one. When the data is uncompressed subsequently, in the first case the data and its quality will be identical, whereas in the second case the quality shall be worse. You will find various compression algorithms which are more effective for different sort of data. Compressing and uncompressing data usually takes a lot of processing time, so the server executing the action should have adequate resources in order to be able to process your data quick enough. An example how information can be compressed is to store just how many sequential positions should have 1 and how many should have 0 in the binary code as an alternative to storing the particular 1s and 0s.