ApexSQL Knowledgebase: How can I reduce the size of my .CHM file?

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How can I reduce the size of my .CHM file?

DESCRIPTION
This article describes how the size of the CHM document can be reduced depending on the selected options for documenting.

SOLUTION
ApexSQL Doc enables you to create feature rich documentation that includes a lot of stuff in the final output. There are a couple of features that stand out as culprits for large documentation size. Let’s review how options changes affect resulting document based on standard SQL Server 2005 database AdventureWorks.

1. The main option that affects the result file size is graphical dependencies: removing this option from the documenting reduces its size on 90%, option can be turned OFF (by default it is turned OFF) here:

2. Table of Contents options:

by default they are all set to ON and the three groups of the Table of Contents are created in the resulting document:

Leaving just one out of these options reduces the size of the document up to 5 %.

3. Two Miscellaneous options:

Show Sections with no Relevant Meta Data to Document option results in displaying the following unnecessary information in the documentation:

Show Nodes for Object Types that don't Exist in Documented Database option results in creating the stub pages with no relevant information

Turning these options off will help saving another 5% of the resulting document size

4. Another set of the options may significantly (30-50%) reduce the size of the resulting document but they also affect the document data quality:

Explicitly Parse Database for Improved Dependency accuracy: It will slow down the analyzing process but returns more dependencies information when the option is ON.
Include Data Definition Language (DDL) Script: adds SQL scripts for all objects to the resulting document:

Highlight Transact-SQL keywords: If this option is checked resulted DDL scripts will have SQL keywords highlighted

Include Documentation of Procedure/Function Result Sets: It will show complete info on what values are returned from function or procedure

As a summary: Depending on the number of graphical dependencies, colors, state of the specified above options, the size of the generated .chm file may be reduced up to 95%. In oour example a .chm file was reduced from 61.5 Mb to 1.3 Mb, but this also affected the quality of data representation in the final document. You need to decide what data is necessary in the document and what may be omitted.

AUTHOR
Dmitriy Dyubchenko

LAST REVIEW DATE
13 July 2009

Labels: ApexSQL Doc

posted by Dmitriy Dyubchenko on Friday, July 10, 2009

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