.NET compression of XML to store in SQL Server database

Question

Currently our .NET application constructs XML data in memory that we persist to a SQL Server database. The XElement object is converted to a string using ToString() and then

Answer 1

This article may help you get a start.

The following snippet can compress a string and return a base-64 coded result:

public static string Compress(string text)
{
 byte[] buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text);
 MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
 using (GZipStream zip = new GZipStream(ms, CompressionMode.Compress, true))
 {
  zip.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
 }

 ms.Position = 0;
 MemoryStream outStream = new MemoryStream();

 byte[] compressed = new byte[ms.Length];
 ms.Read(compressed, 0, compressed.Length);

 byte[] gzBuffer = new byte[compressed.Length + 4];
 System.Buffer.BlockCopy(compressed, 0, gzBuffer, 4, compressed.Length);
 System.Buffer.BlockCopy(BitConverter.GetBytes(buffer.Length), 0, gzBuffer, 0, 4);
 return Convert.ToBase64String (gzBuffer);
}

EDIT: As an aside, you may want to use CLOB formats even when storing XML as text because varchars have a very limited length - which XML can often quickly exceed.