Let us imagine that you have to store large chunks of data inside MS SQL. Not some files on a hard disk, but simply long strings of technological data imploded from some arrays. So that the data often copies itself within a string. And the task is to archive the whole thing. No other way.

7zip + MS SQL = Friends

Because 7zip is open-source, we can easily find a .NET project which implements the archiver. Then we wrap it as a CLR for MS SQL.

This is what we get as a result:

The silly string has collapsed to 18 percent of its original. If the string constains concatenated numbers — it gets zipped as successfully.

Instructions?

Feel free to use and hack.