What is multivalued compression in Teradata?

What is multivalued compression in Teradata?

Multivalued compression or just MVC is a compression technique applied on columns in Teradata .  MVC has a unique feature of compressing up-to 255 distinct values per column in a given table. 

The advantage of compression are

• Reduced Storage cost by storing more of a logical data than physical data.
• Performance is greatly improves due to  reduced retrieval of physical data for that column.   

Tables having compression always have an advantage since optimizer considers reduced I/O as one of the factors for generating EXPLAIN plan.