TomThomson (12/7/2010)
BoL is wonderfully ambiguous on this. One can go with the definition that says Page Compression is the whole thing, including Row Compression, or one can go with the conflicting statementAs data is added to the first data page, data is row-compressed. Because the page is not full, no benefit is gained from page compression. When the page is full, the next row to be added initiates the page compression operation.
that's on the very same BoL page as the statement that Page Compression consists of Row Compression, Prefix Compression, and Dictionary Compression. The conficting version seems to be confirmed by the statement (on a different page) that non-leaf index pages are not page compressed but are row compressed. So faced with this question one has to guess which of the two contradictory MS definitions of page compression the questioner believes - there is no rational way of choosing one over the other.
I don't think questions with that degree of unanswerableness should be put int QOTD except perhaps in the humour category.
A Microsoft employee has mentioned to me in their lab tests that selecting Page Compression for all tables is a good start rather than deciding to pick and choose between row or page for a table. That person also mentioned that on average pretty much everything got better, with some exceptions... in those cases you just have to work those out/fix. But the overall improvements outweighed the negative.
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...0.05 points per day since registration... slowly crawl up to 1 pt per day hopefully 😀