Hi Steve,

Thanks very much for your reply.

I will research the link you posted.

Long ago, when this server was running SQL 2008R2 RTM, there was indeed an issue with ghost cleanup. But now we are running SQL 2008R2 SP2, which along the way had a number of bug fixes related to the ghost cleanup process. I will verify again to make sure this not the issue.

The delete is something like:

delete CompressedDataStore

where (CreationDate < @InActiveRecordsDate )

OR (Active = 0 AND CreationDate < @ActiveRecordsDate )

When I copied the table to a new file group, I did an index rebuild, but of course that doesn't touch any of the LOB data.

sys.allocation_units returns:

type_descLOB_DATA

total_pages 19321790

used_pages 19321607

data_pages 0

The image column stores compressed versions of client records, using some zip library (not my design). If a client needs to roll back to a previous version of their data, this archive is decompressed and voila. I'm not sure that varchar(max) could/would handle this, but also doubt management will change without extremely dire circumstances, as this process is one of the cornerstones of the system.

Thanks,

sqlnyc