If bandwidth is limited, creating a ZIP or RAR file will allow faster downloads and will reduce the chance of data corruption. If you use a Linux operating system with SQL Server, you may want to use the Unix zip command-line tool to manage these files. The most modern operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, MAC OS, and Unix/Linux, can handle ZIP files. The ZIP or RAR command compresses one or more files and bundles them into a single file. The prevalent way to store and share sets of multiple files is to use the ZIP or RAR file format. While download time depends on the end user’s internet bandwidth, it is much more dependent on the server side’s configured resources:
If the file size is much larger than needed, it will take longer to download. This requires more server-side resources, such as CPU, memory, file system, etc., and may cause issues on the end-user side.
While typically the size of the file depends on the amount of data that is exported, when furnishing to domain-specific, the size of the data export will be larger in size than normal. Microsoft SQL Server offers the ability to export data into CSV, Excel, PDF and other formats with the help of xp_cmdshell in T-SQL.
