Reducing Your Storage Footprint Using SQL Storage Compress

I was asked to speak at SQL in the City in New York and Austin Texas.  I have used many red-gate products in my time as a DBA but was not familiar with SQL Storage Compress until a couple of months ago.  I did what any regular DBA would do, downloaded a demo and put it on my development server to see what all this tool can do.

I was utterly shocked to see how simple the installation is and how much many of my databases were being compressed by.  With copies of production databases I was seeing up to 92% compression and as little as 71%.

In the demo I am putting together for SQL in the City I used Adam Machanic’s script to grow Adventure Works to 2.5 GB in size.  I am only getting 58% compression.  You read that correctly, still getting 58% compression rate.  Image that type of reduction of storage across all your Dev, QA, staging, training and reporting environments.

In talking with red-gate the tool is priced based on environment.  They really make it worthwhile for organizations to utilize this tool.  A rough estimate is 1k per uncompressed TB of storage.  With enterprise storage ranging between 5k – 10k of usable TB of storage, SQL Storage Compress is a bargain.

How does this compare to native SQL Server Compression, well for once you don’t have to have Enterprise Edition and it can compress both your data and log files entirely.  No need to specify table by table and page or row level compression.  It is certainly easier to use and manage but how about performance?  For that you will need to conduct your own case studies.  I will start mine next week.

For a quick demo on installing and compressing a database using SQL Storage Compress, take a look at my 3 minute demo on YouTube.