In this post, I am sharing an interesting fact on the disk usage by extra tabs and spaces of SQL Server object’s definition.

Many of you don’t know that extra spaces and tabs are occupying the disk in SQL Server. People are creating their own coding standard and giving a huge number of extra spaces in the object definition.

Nowadays, the disk is not that much costlier so few extra KBs/MBs we can afford. But I saw few servers, where companies are creating a separate database for each client and one database contained thousands of stored procedures.

So I would suggest, please follow the best practices in your coding life.
From tomorrow, I am going to share few articles on SQL Server Coding Standard and best practices.

Here, I created two stored procedures where one has extra tabs and other has normal spaces. You can easily get the size difference between these two stored procedures.

Create sample Stored Procedure with extra Tabs and Spaces:

CREATE PROCEDURE usp_ABC
AS
BEGIN
	DECLARE						@Name					VARCHAR(20)
	DECLARE						@Add					VARCHAR(100)	
END

Create sample Stored Procedure without extra Tabs and Spaces:

CREATE PROCEDURE usp_XYZ
AS
BEGIN
	DECLARE	@Name VARCHAR(20)
	DECLARE @Add VARCHAR(100)	
END

Compare the size of above SPs:

SELECT 
	[p].[name]
	,size = DATALENGTH([asm].[definition]) 
FROM sys.all_sql_modules AS asm
INNER JOIN sys.procedures AS p
ON [asm].[object_id] = [p].[object_id]
WHERE [p].[name] IN ('usp_ABC','usp_XYZ')

Result:

name          size
-----------  ---------
usp_ABC	      230
usp_XYZ       198