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The main point is to skip the indices, which you have to do pre-compression.

When I do stuff like this, I stream the dump straight into gzip. (You can usually figure out a way to stream directly to the destination without an intermediate file at all.)

Plus this way it stays stored compressed at its destination. If your purpose is backup rather than a poor man's replication.

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The main point was decreasing the transfer time - if rsync -z makes it short enough, it doesn't matter if the indices are there or not, and you also skip the step of re-creating the DB from the text file.

The point of the article is that it does matter if the indices are there. And indices generally don't compress very well anyways. What compresses well are usually things like human-readable text fields or booleans/enums.

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