Saving rich text format to sql table uses a lot of space

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Hi all, when i save rtf information to SQL table i notice that it consumes a lot of space. A text with 1000 symbols normally gets about 2500 symbols in rtf format in database (when I add more formatting, symbols number increase). Do programmers usually save so much information in SQL table and is it normal to have so much?
Will it be wrong if my table gets 10000 characters in it?

Thanks for any replies, I'd really appreciate them!

Posted 12-Jul-11 14:04pm

George Findulov

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Philippe Mori 12-Jul-11 22:11pm

For a size of a few kilobytes, it should not matters much provide that you don't load the data uselessly. That is, it you don't need that column when iterating the data or getting one row, then don't load it.

By the way, when images are stored in a databse, they would typically be much bigger that these figures.

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Solution 1

I would ask whether the formatting is really data or just formatting for display. If it is for display only, perhaps that should be added in a report when you display the data and only the actual data (text) itself needs to be saved.

But, that depends on your application. If the formatting is what you want to save, you'll either have to save the rtf data or figure another way to save the format information. Personally I don't think I've ever had a case where I wanted all the format info saved.

Posted 12-Jul-11 15:46pm

Dr.Walt Fair, PE

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skv_lviv · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-12T16:18:00

It depends on how much records do you predict. If there will be 1000-10000 of such records it shouldn't be a big problem, if millions, then probably it is not very good, but why not? For example Microsoft Sql Express, which is free, supports up to 10 Gb per database, so it supposed to handle big data. Commercial versions are not limited with this value. It looks like it is quite normal.

And you always can decreased used size using compression (System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream and System.IO.Compression.GZipStream) which will help you to store less information. They should compress text (which rtf is) quite good.