A system for, and method of compressing a data table using models and a database management system incorporating the system or the method. In one embodiment, the system includes: (1) a table modeller that discovers data mining models with guaranteed error bounds of at least one attribute in the data table in terms of other attributes in the data table and (2) a model selector, associated with the table modeller, that selects a subset of the at least one model to form a basis upon which to compress the data table.