Niko Neugebauer has a way of estimating disk size after creating a columnstore index on a table:
For anyone working with SQL Server since version 2005 (with Service Pack 2 to be precise) there is a very common task when thinking or research the system optimisation – the usage of the compression, and before advancing with this step the question that one usually receives is – “can you estimate how much improvement we shall get?”
For this purpose since SQL Server 2008, we have a very useful stored procedure that is called sp_estimate_data_compression_savings, that is capable of providing us with the estimation of how much storage we can save by enabling or moving to a more effective compression method (as in NONE | ROW | PAGE types).
Columnstore Indexes have appeared in SQL Server 2012 (that is well over 6 years ago) and even though from time to time I would ask and suggest to enable the stored procedure sp_estimate_data_compression_savings to start supporting Columnstore Indexes, until now there is no such support.Until now – I am introducing a conjunction of my scripts in a comprehensive and reasonably capable stored procedure that is called “cstore_sp_estimate_columnstore_compression_savings” and that is a part of my free & open-sourced Columnstore Indexes Script Library, freely available on GitHub.
That’s a useful addition, especially when you’re trying to sell management on using clustered columnstore indexes.