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Enabling row compression in SQL Server

Enabling row and page compression can give you a big performance gain in SQL Server. IO remains expensive especially when your SQL Server is still using spinning disks. By enabling row (and page) compression you can decrease the amount of storage needed on disk a lot.

How to enable row compression?

We’ll start by estimating the space savings for row compression by executing the following stored procedure:

EXEC sp_estimate_data_compression_savings 'vervoer', 'MAD', NULL, NULL, 'ROW' ;  
GO
Here are the results we get back:
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By comparing the column size_with_requested_compression_setting(KB) and dividing by the column size_with_current_compression_setting(KB), you can save over 50%. Sounds good enough for me, let’s enable this:
ALTER TABLE vervoer.MAD REBUILD PARTITION = ALL 
WITH  
(DATA_COMPRESSION = ROW) 
GO

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