Example embodiments of the present invention effectively manage a large set of records such that each can be quickly accessed while still reducing the system capacity used for storing the records by taking into account specifics of the record structure. A template document is constructed for a large set of similar documents, such that it represents the maximum common portion of content in the document set. The template is compressed and stored. Every document in the set is then concatenated individually to the uncompressed template and the concatenated result is compressed. The compressed template is then subtracted from the combined compressed result. The result of this subtraction is stored in the data store for each document. Effectively, only the compressed difference between each document and the template is stored, which reduces significantly the amount of capacity necessary for storing the document set (e.g., by a factor of 5 or 10).