Difficulty compressing a huge database - compact command fails

Question

I am trying to compress a 419 GB database, following the instructions in the compression example described here: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190257(v=sql.90).aspx
I have set the filegroup to read-only, and taken the database offline.  I logged into the server that hosts the file, and ran this from a command prompt:
===================================================== 
F:\Database>compact /c CE_SecurityLogsArchive_DataSecondary.ndf
 Compressing files in F:\Database\
CE_SecurityLogsArchive_DataSecondary.ndf [ERR]
CE_SecurityLogsArchive_DataSecondary.ndf: Insufficient system resources exist to
 complete the requested service.
0 files within 1 directories were compressed.
0 total bytes of data are stored in 0 bytes.
The compression ratio is 1.0 to 1.
F:\Database>
===============================================
As you can see, it gave me an error: "Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service."  The drive has 564 GB free, so I doubt that is the issue.  Here are some specs on the server:
MS Windows Server 2003 R2, Enterprise x64 Edition, SP2
Intel Xeon E7420 CPU @ 2.13 GHz; 8 logical processors (8 physical)
7.99 GB RAM
Any suggestions how to handle this?  I really need to get this huge file compressed, and this method seems appealing if I can make it work, because you can supposedly continue to query from the database even though it has been compressed.

Answer 1

I hope that you observed that this operation is only supported on read-only filegroups. Don't do this, if you plan to write to the tables in this filegroup.
I don't know the fine-print of the COMPACT command, and a Windows forum is probably a better forum to ask. But a guess is that the command works in-memory only, in which case 419 GB is far more than a mouthful for a machine with 8 GB of memory.
There are compression facilities in SQL Server itself, but you need Enterprise Edition for this. (And SQL 2008 or later.) But they are likely to give better effect than NTFS compression. And you don't have to set the filegroup as read-only.
By the way, while 419 GB is not exactly a small database, it does not qualifies as huge. There are databases with thousandfold size out there.
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, [email protected]