If your DB is large, storing hundreds of copies of a database will exceed your storage capacity, probably catching you unprepared and busy with something else. gzip compression will almost certainly hurt, since it impede's SVN's ability to compress between revisions, and I think SVN already uses a zip library internally. You might take take a few days worth of backups and try it both ways and see which one uses less disk. It'll probably also be helpful to order the dump in some way, like say with --order-by-primary; otherwise, SVN will have to waste disk representing frivolous reorderings of mysqldump, which you don't care about.
But eventually you have to simply discard data. One interesting approach I've seen went by the name of "logarithmic backups". The idea is that newer backups are more important than older backups, so you save more of them and expire most of them as they age. So you end up with
- 7 daily backups from the past week
- 12 monthly backups from the past year
- 1 annual backup from years prior.
This is a similar approach to RRDtool, where data is consolidated into a representative object. You wind up with 20+ backups total, and the ability to recover short lived data from the recent past and long-lived data from the distant past.
Actually answering the question
Since your data is relatively small, and probably doesn't change much, SVN might not be a bad approach.
I have a similar process for putting websites of interest into SVN, which I've modified to suit your needs. Put this in your cron.daily or whereever, and it'll get you done. You will need to initialize the repo first, and tweak it to suit your needs, but this is a good start:
#!/bin/bash
# check out to temp dir
DIR=`mktemp -d`
cd $DIR
# check out repository
svn co $1 .
# dump db
mysqldump --order-by-primary -u root -pPASSWORD database_name
# if changed, commit
svn commit -m 'Nightly backup'
cd ..
rm -rf $DIR