SQL Server 2005

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SQL Server 2005

Vinay Thankur

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August 13, 2009 at 10:35 pm

#209420

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2005
Thanx.
Vinay
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Joy Smith San SSC-Insane Points: 24877 More actions · Answer 1

Thanks. To be frank I was not aware about it.

And I have never seen anybody using it as well.

Davide Lonardoni SSC Veteran Points: 296 More actions · Answer 2

And according to BOL is already obsolete. Btw anybody find it useful?

SA-1 SSCrazy Eights Points: 8113 More actions · Answer 3

I didn't realize that it was already obsolete up until now. I have tested this for a very large DW and have seen significant disk space savings.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736291 More actions · Answer 4

It was introduced for data warehouses and cubes, offering savings if you store significant amounts of decimal data.

SQLWinther SSCertifiable Points: 6294 More actions · Answer 5

I found it usefull in a large database on a server with many CPU:s and I/0 bottleneck, but now we have replaced it with table compression in SQL server 2008, and it is much more usefull. (We have 4 quad processors 🙂 )

/Håkan Winther
MCITP:Database Developer 2008
MCTS: SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance
MCSE: Data Platform

TomThomson SSC Guru Points: 104773 More actions · Answer 6

It's hard to understand why MS introduced this storage format - perhaps they hadn't yet decided to provide table compression in the next version when they did this (although one would thing SQL2008 was in a pretty advanced stage by the time SQL2005 SP2 content was defined). Using a long format + compression (store the affected tables on a compressed partition in older or less facility-rich SQLServer versions ; use SQL table compression if you have the right SQL version) is going to be far cleaner and give greater savings almost always. Of course if you have a very large very sparse matrix of decimal values, and want to store it in fully expanded form (ie as if it were not sparse) in a table it's possible that vardecimal might do as well as or maybe even better than compression, but (a) I think it's unlikely that vardecimal actually would do better and (b) I really can't imagine anyone wanting to do that.

Tom