I've decided to compare the compression options available in SQL 2014 CTP2 and created two identical tables T1 (without compression) and T2 (with PAGE compression). CREATE TABLE T1 ( ID INT IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED , FirstName VARCHAR(255) , LastName VARCHAR(255) , Age TinyInt , Province CHAR(2) ); GO CREATE TABLE T2 ( ID INT IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED , FirstName VARCHAR(255) , LastName VARCHAR(255) , Age TinyInt , Province CHAR(2) ) WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE); GO I populated them with 42,5 mil records like this Declare @i int, @j int, @age tinyint, @id int, @maxFN INT, @maxLN INT, @province CHAR(2) , @st datetime; Declare @Prov TABLE (ID INT IDENTITY, Name CHAR(2)); SET NOCOUNT ON; INSERT INTO @Prov(Name) VALUES ('ON'); INSERT INTO @Prov(Name) VALUES ('QC'); INSERT INTO @Prov(Name) VALUES ('NS'); INSERT INTO @Prov(Name) VALU