Any one implement MSSQL 2008 page compression on productive system?

[former_member211576]

Hi experts,

Is there anyone implement MSSQL 2008 page compression on prodctive system? I know page compress has a great performance penalty on insert/update/delete, is there a guideline to decide wether or not to use page compression on specfic table?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Dennis,

as far as I know PAGE compression is not yet supported by SAP. What is supported though, is ROW compression. Depending on your system you will see up to 40% savings in diskspace (our experience). When we talk about ROW compression there is absolutly no negative performance impact (the same was true for PAGE compression under normal load). You are right, PAGE compression demands more CPU cycles to compress and uncompress the data. But in comparison to SAN storage, additional CPUs (cores) are very cheap!

Please check these ressources:

[Note 991014|http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/991014]

[MS IT|http://blogs.msdn.com/saponsqlserver/archive/2008/11/24/procedure-used-for-applying-database-compression-to-microsoft-sap-erp-system.aspx]

Sven

[former_member211576]

We use compress on ERP currently an no problem at all.

[former_member211576]

Hi Sven,

We run our ERP system with 24/7/365. I have only once chance in a year(Chinese New Year) for a long downtime(36 hours). Our Storage is 6TB, our currently DB size is 4TB, and monthly growth 600+GB. That's why I must ruch and decide the best way to select compression method on each table. I am not pretty sure what page compression will really impact average dialog response time. Maybe our powerful Superdome and EVA 8100 can cover it. That' why I am asking for some advise.

Yes, sure. if I have enough time, I can uncompress it. But before I do that, I may be in serious trouble or be fired if it's really serious impact productive operations.

[former_member211576]

Hi Sven,

According to my infomation, althrough SAP has not announced yet, SAP Labs has well tested on ROW and PAGE compression. We have 32 cores Superdome, and the average CPU utilization is about 10~30%. I am considering to use most tables with page compression becuase of high percentage disk saving, but I still worry about it maybe has great impact on some critical transactions. I had read Juergen Blog before, he think there will not be a great impact? But I need real world's data & experience.

[Former Member]

Hi Dennis,

I just went through our testing results on a SAP BI (~8.5 TB). According to my figures we experienced an increase of CPU-Load between 5 and 15% (with PAGE compression on normal load). But as I said, we go for ROW compression in a first step (ECC + BI) for the complete database - not just selected tables. This way we are sure that we have no performance impact and still leverage a great deal of disk savings. Why do you rush for PAGE compression? Do you think that the extra savings in disk space are worth the risk of performance degration? The good thing about compression is that you can always set it back to an umcompressed state

Sven