compression – sqlsunday.com

Migrating a database from Enterprise to Standard Edition?

You can move or copy a database from Enterprise Edition (or Developer Edition, which supports more or less the same feature set) to Standard Edition. The simplest way is to take a backup of the database and restore that on the new server. However, if there are any Enterprise Edition features left in the database, the restored database won’t start up, and you’ll get this error, or something similar:

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
------------------------------

Restore of database ‘databaseName’ failed. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.RelationalEngineTasks)

------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. (Microsoft.SqlServer.SmoExtended)

------------------------------

Database 'databaseName' cannot be started in this edition of SQL Server because part or all of object 'myTableName' is enabled with data compression or vardecimal storage format. Data compression and vardecimal storage format are only supported on SQL Server Enterprise Edition.
Database 'databaseName' cannot be started because some of the database functionality is not available in the current edition of SQL Server. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 909)

Viewing the size of your database objects

Here’s a practical script that I built to view how much space each database object takes up in the database. The script also show you information on how many rows a table (or indexed view) contains, as well as if it’s partitioned and/or compressed.

Efficient data, part 3: Compression

This is the third part in a series of articles on optimizing large volumes of data. This part is all about using compression, and since I wrote an article on that a few months ago, I’m not going to re-invent the wheel. So this article is a repost of my july article on compression.

Using compression

If you’re lucky enough to be working with an Enterprise Edition of SQL Server, you may be missing out on a really great feature that can boost your I/O performance considerably. And as an added bonus, it’ll save you disk space..