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Celestial avatar image
Celestial asked

DateTime and Decimal data types space handling!

Hi, I have come to know that Date Time and Decimal data types occupy fixed space even if they do not have data in them. I have a case in which i have too many Decimal and Date Time columns in my table which in most of the cases are NULL (80%). due to this, it consumes too much space. I wanted to know if there is any way to minimize this space consumption ? is it possible through Partitioning or created Detailed Tables for this? Your help is appreciated.
datetimedecimal
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Kev Riley avatar image
Kev Riley answered
You could look into using [sparse columns][1]. There is a trade off against the space needed for non-null values, but at your levels (80%) seem to be well above the thresholds that MS publish. [1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280604.aspx
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