title: Is it worthwhile to compress BLOBs?
body: <p>I'm looking at altering a table with an IMAGE column.  I'll be changing it to VARBINARY(MAX), but I'm also considering compressing the data in this column in the hope that it will improve performance.</p>
  
  <p>Here are the things I'm considering:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Individual values are generally small but can be very large, up to several MB.</li>
  <li>The table sees relatively high query volume.</li>
  <li>Individual queries may retrieve hundreds of rows' worth of data.</li>
  <li>Round-trip time on this query sometimes dominates application performance.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>It's more about reducing the amount of time it takes to get results back from a query than reducing table size, so compression would be done in the application rather than on the server.  So, is it worth a shot, or will I be wasting my time?</p>