We used this to great effect at Facebook for MySQL backups in the early 2010s. The backup hosts had far more CPU than needed so it was a very nice speed-up over gzip. Eventually we switched to zstd, of course, but pigz never failed us.
I recall learning the technique from Tumblr's eng blog.
https://engineering.tumblr.com/post/7658008285/efficiently-c...
Separately, at Tumblr I vaguely remember examining some alternative to pigz that was consistently faster at the time (11 years ago) because pigz couldn't parallelize decompression. Can't quite remember the name of the alternative, but it had licensing restrictions which made it less attractive than pigz.
Edit: the old fast alternative I was thinking of is qpress, formerly hosted at http://www.quicklz.com/ but that's no longer online. Googling it now, there are some mirrors and also looks like Percona tools used/bundled it. Not sure if they still do or if they've since switched to zstd.
SQL backups were simply a bash script using Pigz, running on a cron job. Simple times!