One new feature in the SQL 2008 product line is on-the-fly compression of backups as a built-in feature of the SQL Relational database.  I've been excited about this feature, and anecdotally happy with the results.

Today I took a few minutes to do a head-to-head comparison of compressed vs. non-compressed backups.  And just for good measure I added in a test to compare the on-the-fly compression with using a secondary compression (WinRar).  This latter approach is one that we've all used for years, and I was interested to see whether I would be "forever done" with using secondary compression now that compression is "baked in" to the product.

The following tests are against a 10.2GB SQL database running on SQL 2008R2 x64 on an 8-CPU database server.

Here are my results:

Windows 2008 shipped recently, and I've been updating my field kit with all of the various installation media and supplemental programs needed for client site deployments.

One issue I ran into is when installing the Books Online standalone package on my Vista x64 laptop:

"This installation package cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service.  You must install a Windows service pack that contains a newer version of the Windows Installer service."

The message is pretty self-explanatory, but it was strange that at this time Windows Update indicates my computer is all up-to-date. 

To resolve this issue I needed to manually download the update to Windows Installer 4.5, apply it, and reboot. Then installing the updated install package proceeded normally.