Because I had the same problem, i.e.wanting to store the PM settings in the database and data size being too large, I looked at using the compression library as suggested by Devin.

24 hours later, I think I better share the solution that I thought would take only 10 minutes to devise. It might save someone in the same situation a lot of time, as the compression and decompression was not as straightforward as expected.

I am using a PersistenceGroup object for saving the settings from, and the settings get applied to this group after retrieval from the database.

public static byte[] ExtractReportSettingAsBinary(

PersistenceGroup inPersistenceGroup)

{

using (MemoryStream memoryStream =

PersistenceManager.Save(inPersistenceGroup))

{

      using (MemoryStream compressed = new MemoryStream())

      {

                     using(DeflateStream compressor = new DeflateStream(

compressed,

CompressionMode.Compress,

CompressionLevel.BestCompression))

                    {

                           memoryStream.CopyTo(compressor);

                    }

                    // Must close compressor

// to force flushing of remaining data!

                    byte[] retVal = compressed.ToArray();

                    return retVal;

        }

}

}

public static void ApplyReportSetting(

ref PersistenceGroup ioPersistenceGroup,

byte[] data)

{

using (Stream dataStream = new MemoryStream(data))

{

       using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())

       {

                    using (DeflateStream decompressor = new DeflateStream(

dataStream,

CompressionMode.Decompress))

                    {

                           decompressor.CopyTo(memoryStream);

                    }

                    // Must close decompressor

      // to force flushing of remaining data!

                    // Reset. Very important, as stream is at end after

      // decompressor used it!

                    memoryStream.Position = 0;

                    // Now apply back to our report

                    PersistenceManager.Load(ioPersistenceGroup, memoryStream);

              }

       }

}