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Kafka supports compressing messages for additional efficiency, however this is more complex than just compressing a raw message. Because individual messages may not have sufficient redundancy to enable good compression ratios, compressed messages must be sent in special batches (although you may use a batch of one if you truly wish to compress a message on its own). The messages to be sent are wrapped (uncompressed) in a MessageSet structure, which is then compressed and stored in the Value field of a single "Message" with the appropriate compression codec set. The receiving system parses the actual MessageSet from the decompressed value. The outer MessageSet should contain only one compressed "Message" (see KAFKA-1718 for details).

Kafka currently supports two compression codecs with the following codec numbers:

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