Raul Gonzalez drops a 2 TB table’s size in half:
So at work, I’d say space matters, and in order to optimize our storage requirements it’s very important to know about SQL Server internals, specially the Storage Engine, which happens to be one of my favorite topics of study.
In my quest to release some space I got to this database, just one table which is 165M of XML documents stored as NVARCHAR(MAX).
It was interesting walking through the process. Some part of me wonders if it’s a bit complex for the next maintainer to handle, but saving a terabyte of disk space is worth a few extra pages of documentation…