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Backup Compression (SQL Server 2012)

By Johan van Soest.

Published : 2014-01-26.

Last updated : 2017-05-02.

This topic describes the compression of SQL Server backups, including restrictions, performance trade-off of compressing backups, the configuration of backup compression, and the compression ratio.

Check the compression rates of backups.

With the modern Microsoft SQL server databases (2008 enterprise or later) it is possible to compress database, log and logshipping backups. To see the current compression ratio of the last backups use the following query.

-- ********************************************************************** 
-- * This script displays the backup and logshipping jobs that ran on 
-- * all the databases, their run time and the compression ratio.
-- *(C)Copyright 2014 - 2024 Johan van Soest http://www.vansoest.it 
-- ********************************************************************* 
SELECT database_name
      ,backup_start_date
      ,backup_size / compressed_backup_size AS 'compression'
FROM msdb..backupset
ORDER BY backup_start_date;

SQL formatted using PoorSQL
With this query result you can easily see the jobs that need to be configured for compression using WITH COMPRESSION in you BACKUP statement.
Read more how to Configure Backup Compression (SQL Server)

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