I still have a hard time getting jazzed about Katmai's backup compression. Again, it's probably because I've been using LiteSpeed for so long, and it's just not news anymore. Not to mention it still has licensing problems. I believe that I talked to someone at MS about this a while back and they said that it was their belief that it was typically enterprise customers who had backups large enough to need compress I still have a hard time getting jazzed about Katmai’s backup compression. Again, it’s probably because I’ve been using LiteSpeed for so long, and it’s just not news anymore. Not to mention it still has licensing problems. I believe that I talked to someone at MS about this a while back and they said that it was their belief that it was typically enterprise customers who had backups large enough to need compression. That’s just not so.There are plenty of dev systems and lesser systems that need compressed backups. Look at it this way. It’s all relative, right? Because if you have a 30GB DB, which isn’t every big, but you’ve only got a 100GB disk to do your backups, then you’ll run out of space pretty fast. And what if you’ve only got 50GB? You may not have enough space to house your full backups and all the logs. So it’s not just huge systems that need compressed backups. It’s any system that is space constrained. And with companies moving DBs around like they do, I just feel that it’s going to cause problems where you least expect it. What if I have an enterprise system with compressed backups and I need to restore it to a system that isn’t enterprise? Say my dev box is standard, what then? And I still say that it’s best to manage all your backups the same way. If you’re going to compress your enterprise backups with the native backup routine, and use something like LiteSpeed for the others, then you’re only inviting trouble… or complication at the very least.So while I suppose I’m glad that MS is at least thinking in that direction, I just don’t think that making it available to only enterprise customers is the best thing. And it certainly isn’t going to hurt the 3rd party vendors’ business any. But if they were to open it up to enterprise and standard, then they could do some real damage. Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at: https://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com Read my book reviews at: www.ITBookworm.com Blog Author of: DBA Rant – https://dbarant.blogspot.com Databases