SQL and Compressed File System

As many people dealing with multiple projects, I often use a single virtual machine for more than one project.

This usually means lots of versions of code, many applications and many databases. This also means that the disk space runs out pretty quickly.

If you cannot expand your virtual hard disk (as in MS VPC...) you have another possibility, apart from deleting stuff, which is to compress the file system.

Now, everything works really fine, MOSS works, the applications work SQL Server works. Wait, SQL Server works-ish. You can query the databases, create and execute stored procedures, create tables etc. etc.

The thing you cannot do is to create databases!!

I discovered this some time ago. At first I thought there was something wrong with my DB creation script, but it worked on other machines. Since I created the script on a SQL 2008 machine, and tried to execute it on a SQL 2005 box, I thought this might be the reason. But again, that same script worked on other SQL 2005 boxes.

I began asking myself what was the difference between the server and, looking at the explorer window, there it was: the two file systems were differently colored!! One was compressed and the other wasn’t.

I tried and uncompressed just the folders where files and logs are saved and bang! My script started working again.

This might be old news for many, but it’s always good to be able to solve problems.