Disk Space Usage and SQL Server Performance

(Gregory A. Larsen) When you think of SQL Server performance components, you think of the usage of CPU, memory, and the I/O it takes to process a query. However, there is another component you should consider. That component is disk space usage. In the old days disk space was expensive, so much so people spent great effort to conserver disk space. Remember the Y2K issues with dates being stored as a 6 character field. The ancient computer programmers left off the first two digits of the year to save 2 bytes of space when storing each date. Today disk drives are inexpensive, so we don’t spend great deals of time thinking of ways to optimize our database design to minimize disk space usage. Nevertheless, every extra byte of space you waste in your database causes a performance hit to your application. This article looks at disk space usage and how it affects performance.