Uncompressed character data in Teradata Database requires one byte per character when storing Latin character data. LZCOMP_L takes Latin character input, compresses it using the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, and returns the compressed result.
LZCOMP_L provides good compression results for long Latin character strings, but might not be as effective for short strings. It can also provide good results for medium strings that have many repeating characters.
Although you can call the function directly, LZCOMP_L is normally used with algorithmic compression (ALC) to compress table columns. If LZCOMP_L is used with ALC, nulls are also compressed if those columns are nullable.