SQL Server supports data compression. Data compression reduces the size of the database, which helps improve query performance because queries on compressed data read fewer pages from the disk and thus use less IO. However, data compression requires extra CPU resources for updates, because data must be decompressed before and compressed after the update. Data compression is therefore suitable for data warehousing scenarios in which data is mostly read and only occasionally updated.
SQL Server supports three compression implementations:
- Row compression: Row compression reduces metadata overhead by storing fixed data type columns in a variable-length format. This includes strings and numeric data. Row ...
