PHP mysql data result set compression

Hi all- is there a way have a large data result set from MySQL compressed? E.g. I have a table with over a million rows of data that I want to do a "select * from " on and then take that result, do some field/data manpulation, and then insert row-by-row to another table. The problem is the result of the query is so big that it's casuing PHP to swap to disk, causing things to slow to a crawl. Doing a "show processlist" on the mysql console shows that "Writing to net" is the state of the running "select * from " query. I tried adding the flag "MYSQL_CLIENT_COMPRESS" to both mysql_pconnect() and mysql_connect() but it doesn't seem to do any compression (I can tell by the size of the running php memory process). Any ideas would be appreciated- thanks. David