Well, at the end of the article he shows this technique used along with gzip. He however does not show a comparison of the original vs his 90deg compression with gzip; so the difference there may be negligible.
He does say that the original file gzipped is 132 bytes, doesn't seem worth it to me.
"After GZip the original file was squeezed down to just 132 bytes, however GZip took my technique down to just 99 bytes which saves a further 33 bytes."
When you want speed - every byte counts right?
You end up basically returning a dump of an SQL query