Sql server standard edition compression

Shrinking is something I guess I've always shy'd away from, many articles or posts here would advise not to use it. Is my assumption correct, in that without compressing, we won't regain space from the trimmed database? Since sp1 all the compression features have been available in all editions, though that may not help you at all as upgrading your production environments I'm assuming they run or earlier?

If you are deleting the data is compression really what you need? If it is, then to suggest how you might reduce the size of the remaining data we'd need to know a lot more about that data and its use. Shrinking is usually not what you want to do so you are correct to be cautious - if the data could grow back to use the space again then you might as well leave it allocated to the DB as this will avoid the future potentially performance harming if they happen at an inconvenient time growth operations, and the shrink process can cause significant fragmentation especially if as I've seen done the data files are shrunk on a regular basis.

But shrink to how large the data is expected to be after a reasonable length of time, don't shrink down to the smallest the current data will fit in. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 4 years, 2 months ago. Active 4 years, 2 months ago. Viewed 5k times. Wondering, what sort of options do I have here? Improve this question. Daniel Daniel 21 1 1 silver badge 2 2 bronze badges. You wouldn't regain disk free space from compressing tables and indexes without shrinking stuff, anyway. You'd just have a bunch of empty space in your data file.

If the final size is less than the allocated space, at the end of the backup operation, the Database Engine shrinks the file to the actual final size of the backup. To allow the backup file to grow only as needed to reach its final size, use trace flag Trace flag causes the backup operation to bypass the default backup compression pre-allocation algorithm.

This trace flag is useful if you need to save on space by allocating only the actual size required for the compressed backup. However, using this trace flag might cause a slight performance penalty a possible increase in the duration of the backup operation. View or Configure the backup compression default Server Configuration Option.

Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Is this page helpful? Please rate your experience Yes No. Any additional feedback? To compress indexes, you must explicitly set the compression property of the indexes.

By default, the compression setting for indexes is set to NONE when the index is created. When a clustered index is created on a heap, the clustered index inherits the compression state of the heap unless an alternative compression state is specified.

When a heap is configured for page-level compression, pages receive page-level compression only in the following ways:. Rebuild the heap by removing and reapplying compression, or by creating and removing a clustered index.

Changing the compression setting of a heap requires all nonclustered indexes on the table to be rebuilt so that they have pointers to the new row locations in the heap.

Enabling compression on a heap is single threaded for an online operation. The disk space requirements for enabling or disabling row or page compression are the same as for creating or rebuilding an index. For partitioned data, you can reduce the space that is required by enabling or disabling compression for one partition at a time.

When you are compressing indexes, leaf-level pages can be compressed with both row and page compression. Non-leaf-level pages do not receive page compression. Because of their size, large-value data types are sometimes stored separately from the normal row data on special purpose pages. Data compression is not available for the data that is stored separately. Tables that implemented the vardecimal storage format in SQL Server 9. You can apply row compression to a table that has the vardecimal storage format.

However, because row compression is a superset of the vardecimal storage format, there is no reason to retain the vardecimal storage format. Decimal values gain no additional compression when you combine the vardecimal storage format with row compression. You can apply page compression to a table that has the vardecimal storage format; however, the vardecimal storage format columns probably will not achieve additional compression.

All supported versions of SQL Server support the vardecimal storage format; however, because data compression achieves the same goals, the vardecimal storage format is deprecated.

Avoid using this feature in new development work, and plan to modify applications that currently use this feature. Columnstore tables and indexes are always stored with columnstore compression. You can further reduce the size of columnstore data by configuring an additional compression called archival compression.

Add or remove archival compression by using the following data compression types:. This next example sets the data compression to columnstore on some partitions, and to columnstore archival on other partitions.

Compressing columnstore indexes with archival compression, causes the index to perform slower than columnstore indexes that do not have the archival compression.