The other day Aaron Bertrand pointed out that a recent tip I wrote had a rather nasty oversight. You can read more about the discussion over at his blog.
The short of it is this: what I wrote in the tip is cot very clear, and is most likely going to be interpreted wrongly. Aaron’s post does a great job of explaining the difference. I also want people to understand that if you are doing compressed backups, you won’t see much added benefit if you also enable data compression. As Aaron points out in his example, the overall benefit on time and size of the final backup file are comparable whether you are compressing data or not.
Hi Thomas,
I read your tip, and with all due respect to you, your readers expect a much more detailed tip (probably with some benchmark tests example) than what you authored considering the level of your expertise. Thankfully, Aaron did a great job adding value to the subject of your tip. Don’t take me wrong, I am a great follower of your writing and what you write is seen like a standard of authoring for people like me 🙂
thank you for your feedback. the tips are designed to be quick and to the point. that particular tip was to show how to enable backup compression. it was never my intention to get into the details of page versus row versus backup compression.
aaron did a wonderful job with his response to some poorly chosen words i used. i felt it was the right thing to do to acknowledge my mistake here as well.
i am far from perfect. but i do appreciate your feedback and will try to take care in the future.
Tom, I did this test myself (on the plane while going to the MVP summit) and while you don’t really gain in size you will gain in restore and backup time
See here: http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DBAdmin/MSSQLServerAdmin/do-you-get-a-benefit-from-compressing-ba
Agreed, and thanks!