In my last tip, I shared some ideas for determining if you should consider breaking up the e-mail addresses you're storing, even putting the domain names in a separate table. I performed storage and timing comparisons for working with 10,000 unique e-mail addresses, but I completely ignored data compression. I wanted to revisit the same test case and apply data compression to the tables and see how that impacted the outcome.  Read more...

A lot has been written about the potential performance benefits of SQL Server data compression; but hard performance data? Not so much.  Read more...

A lot has been written about the potential performance benefits of SQL Server data compression; but hard performance data? Not so much.  Read more...

Data compression is an Enterprise Edition only feature that was added in SQL Server 2008. It allows you to use...  Read more...

Making it easier to handle huge data sets  Read more...

The data compression feature in SQL Server 2008 helps compress the data inside a database, and it can help reduce the size of the database. Apart from the space savings, data compression provides another benefit: Because compressed data is stored in fewer pages, queries need to read fewer pages from the disk, thereby improving the performance of I/O intensive workloads. However, extra CPU resources are required on the database server to compress and decompress the data, while data is exchanged with the application. Therefore, it is important to understand the workload characteristics when deciding which tables to compress.  Read more...

One of the more exciting new features in SQL Server 2008 is data compression and Nicholas Cain talks a bit about how this works and how to determine if it fits in your environment.  Read more...

That’s correct. SQL Server 2005 SP2 supports data compression using Vardecimal data type.  Read more...