I have just turned on page compression on a table (SQL 2008 Ent) using the following command:
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[Table1] REBUILD PARTITION = ALL
WITH
(DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE
)
The hard drive now contains 50GB less space than before. I’m guessing that I need to run a command to reclaim the space. Anyone know it?
I feel embarrassed even asking this question, but is it something that could be fixed by shrink the database in question? As it compressed the pages, perhaps it left the space free all throughout the file, and the data files just need to be condensed and shrunk to reclaim the space…
If it created a new, compressed copy of the table and then removed the old one from the file, but didn’t shrink the file internally, this might also explain your sudden lack of space on the drive as well.
If this is the case, then a simple “DBCC SHRINKDATABASE(‘my_database’)” should do the trick. NOTE: This may take a long time, and lock the database during that time so as to prevent access, so schedule it wisely.