For many organizations, Microsoft SQL Server provides the back-end power behind some of their most important applications. Unfortunately, many of those applications can be space hogs, producing megabytes (or gigabytes) of new data every day. Even worse, many applications provide little or no archiving capability, expecting you to simply keep piling on the data. If you’ve got a nice big SAN to store all of that data, you might not mind, but in some cases you might want to look at saving a bit of room – especially on older servers with shrinking free capacity.
SQL Server’s own database compression is an option worth considering – along with options for compressing those space-hungry SQL Server backups. The article, Saving Space in SQL Server, and video, Methods for Compressing a SQL Database, that accompany this post will explain your options, and even show you where to find them.
Have you had challenges reducing your database size? How have you tried reducing space?
