(The Curious Case of… used to be part of our bi-weekly newsletter but we decided to make it a regular blog post instead so it can sometimes be more frequent. It covers something interesting one of us encountered when working with a client, doing some testing, or were asked in a random question from the community.)
Yesterday I was chatting with Jonathan about some of the internals of the page compression algorithms for a client discussion. When you enable page compression, rows are first just row compressed (storing values with empty bytes stripped out) until a page fills up. The Storage Engine then attempts