InstantForum.NET v2.9.0SQLServerCentralhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/notifications@sqlservercentral.comTue, 18 Jun 2013 16:46:36 GMT20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxIt's hard to understand why MS introduced this storage format - perhaps they hadn't yet decided to provide table compression in the next version when they did this (although one would thing SQL2008 was in a pretty advanced stage by the time SQL2005 SP2 content was defined). Using a long format + compression (store the affected tables on a compressed partition in older or less facility-rich SQLServer versions ; use SQL table compression if you have the right SQL version) is going to be far cleaner and give greater savings almost always. Of course if you have a very large very sparse matrix of decimal values, and want to store it in fully expanded form (ie as if it were not sparse) in a table it's possible that vardecimal might do as well as or maybe even better than compression, but (a) I think it's unlikely that vardecimal actually would do better and (b) I really can't imagine anyone wanting to do that.Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:53:38 GMTL' Eomot Inverséhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxI found it usefull in a large database on a server with many CPU:s and I/0 bottleneck, but now we have replaced it with table compression in SQL server 2008, and it is much more usefull. (We have 4 quad processors :) )Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:24:49 GMThakan.wintherhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxIt was introduced for data warehouses and cubes, offering savings if you store significant amounts of decimal data.Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:58:23 GMTSteve Jones - SSC Editorhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxI didn't realize that it was already obsolete up until now. I have tested this for a very large DW and have seen significant disk space savings.Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:35:41 GMTSA-1http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxAnd according to BOL is already obsolete. Btw anybody find it useful?Fri, 14 Aug 2009 06:18:33 GMTDavide Lonardonihttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxThanks. To be frank I was not aware about it.And I have never seen anybody using it as well.Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:40:56 GMTJoy Smith Sanhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic770668-1612-1.aspxComments posted to this topic are about the item [B]<A HREF="/questions/Vardecimal/66691/">SQL Server 2005</A>[/B]Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:35:26 GMTVinay Thakur-585143