Can You Compress a Temp Table?

 Hello Dear Reader!  We are finishing up the final day of the Performance Tuning Workshop here in Atlanta and I got an interesting question on Compression from Tim Radney (@tradney | Blog).

The question: Can you compress a temp table? Just a quick blog to get the answer out there while Gareth Swanepoel (@GarethSwan | Blog)  teaches the class about Extended Events. 

My guess was yes.  Temp Tables can have statistics, Clustered and Non-Clustered Indexes, while they only exist in the session they are created, I would be they could be compressed.  If you would actually want to compress them is a different discussion, but let’s prove this out.

DEMO

Here’s a quick demo to show you can do this.  So first up we will create our Temp Table specifying with Data_Compression=ROW.

This will create our temp table #myTable1, we will then insert 15000.

if exists(select name from tempdb.sys.tables where name like '#myTable1%')

begin

     drop table #mytable1

end

go

create table #myTable1(

              myid int identity(1,1) primary key clustered

              ,mychar1 char(500) default 'a'

              ,mychar2 char(3000) default 'b'

              ) with (data_compression=row)

go

declare @i int

set @i=0

while(@i<5000)

begin

     set @i=@i+1

     insert into #myTable1

     default values

end

Now let’s use DBCC IND to view the pages associated with our table, and DBCC Page to Validate that our data is compressed.

dbcc ind(tempdb, '#myTable1', 1)

go

dbcc traceon(3604)

go

dbcc page('tempdb', 1, 376,3)

go

Looking at the output of DBCC Page I can see that the CD array for my compressed data is present near the header.  Row compression is indeed on.

Now let’s rebuild this using page compression on a rebuild operation using sp_spaceused to measure the size of the table.

And it is now Page Compressed.  Thanks for the question Tim!  And as always Dear Reader Thank you for stopping by.

Thanks,

Brad