Two users get vastly different file sizes when using results to file option

Question

Two users get vastly different file sizes when using results to file option

replace('!','?')

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May 23, 2012 at 9:58 am

#261897

Hello, (I hope I'm posting this in the right place)
We are exporting some tables to text to give to a client. We set query results to file to create .rpt files (SQL Server 2005). When one user did this, the resulting files were huge. Another user on the same tables/database/server got much smaller files. The files do not have any oversized text fields, etc. Can anyone explain this?
Examples:
(File/Rows/Size of text file for User 1/Size of text file for User 2)
File 1: 1,667,469 rows/ User 1 rpt: 1.7GB/ User 2 rpt: 253MB
File 2: 515,120 rows/ User 1 rpt: 379MB/ User 2 rpt: 96MB
File 3: 15,215,975 rows/ User 1 rpt: 24.4GB/ User 2 rpt: 2.5GB
Thanks for any feedback.

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Lynn Pettis SSC Guru Points: 442467 More actions · Answer 1

Based on what has been provided, nope. We can't see from here what you see there.

Have you tried running these same queries to see what you get and to see if there are any differences between the files?

replace('!','?') SSC Enthusiast Points: 121 More actions · Answer 2

The queries run exactly the same - it's just the results to file that generate such big differences.

I'm wondering if there's some kind of user-related setting that determines how files are saved.

Thanks for your comment.

RBarryYoung SSC Guru Points: 143329 More actions · Answer 3

Open the files up and take a look at them. Or post them here as attachments and we'll look at them. (smaller ones than this though)

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DBA_Dom SSCrazy Points: 2902 More actions · Answer 4

Not sure if or where it might be but I had the results to text include a lot of extra non printable data. Where if I opened it ( Been a while but i think i opened in excel) and then saved it as a .csv the same file became half the size of the original. I would suggest to check both the users options for query results - Results to Text and see if there are any differences there.