Why is my H2 database 7x larger on disk than it should be?

Question

I have an H2 database that has ballooned to several Gigabytes in size, causing all sorts of operational problems. The database size didn\'t seem right. So I took one little slic

Answer 1

There's always indices, etc. to be taken into account.

Can you try:

CALL DISK_SPACE_USED('my_table');

Also, I would also recommend running SHUTDOWN DEFRAG and calculating the size again.

Answer 2

Setting MV_STORE=FALSE on database creation solves the problem. Whole database (not the test slice from the example) is now approximately 10x smaller.

Update

I had to revisit this topic recently and had to run a comparison to MySQL. On my test dataset, when MV_STORE=FALSE, the H2 database takes up 360MB of disk space, while the same data on MySQL 5.7 InnoDB with default-ish configurations takes up 432MB. YMMV.