Chapter 48
Data Compression
In This Chapter
Understanding Compression
Reducing I/O
Applying Database Compression Procedures
Learning Compression Strategies
Pushing a database into the tens of thousands of transactions per second requires massive amounts of raw I/O performance. At those rates, today's servers can supply the CPU and memory, but I/O struggles. By reducing the raw size of the data, data compression trades I/O for CPU, improving performance.
SQL Server 2008 introduced data compression. Unfortunately, it was not as widely publicized as you might anticipate. This could be because it is only available in the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server. However, it is an important feature that offers tremendous benefits, and it's easy to enable.
In other words, data compression doesn't warrant an entire chapter because of its complexity or length, but because of its value. Its impact is such that it deserves center stage, at least for this chapter.
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