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Compression and Decompression with SQL Server

Randolph West asks a pair of questions:

On Twitter recently, I asked:

Does anyone I know use the COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS features in T-SQL?

To those who replied in the affirmative, I asked:

What made you decide on this as opposed to ROW or PAGE compression?

Read on to learn the responses. In my case, I’ve seen COMPRESS and DECOMPRESS used in two places. First, compressing large product descriptions (large enough to go to LOB). Second, I use it to compress binary models created via SQL Server Machine Learning Services. Some of those models compress quite nicely.