Row compression is one of these performance tricks that can have a big impact on your SQL Server database. I got a questioj from a colleague about the difference with page compression. So here is the (short) answer:
Row compression is a subset of page compression. This means that when page compression is enabled row compression is active as well.
So what is row compression adding to the table(no pun intended)?
Page compression will combine in the following order:
- Row compression
- Prefix compression
- Dictionary compression
The difference between those is well explained in the SQL Server documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/sql/sql-server-2012/cc280464(v=sql.110)
If you are in doubt if you should enable page compression or not, the following article will give you some guidance: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/sql/sql-server-2008/dd894051(v=sql.100)