Compressing LOB Data

Andy Mallon wants to compress LOB data:

The COMPRESS() function takes an input of string or binary data, and applies the gzip algorithm to it. It returns a value of type varbinary(max). In essence, instead of storing string or binary data, you can gzip it up and store it in a varbinary(max) column. There’s also a DECOMPRESS() function for when you are reading the data and need to unzip it.

This costs some CPU, but gzip can save quite a bit of space. How much space, and whether it’s worth the CPU cost will vary depending on your data and workload. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at one table. We’ll look at the space savings we get out of using COMPRESS(), and we’ll look at the effort necessary to implement it.

Read on for Andy’s test and thoughts.