How much space is one row taking up

Question

I need to find out how much disk space a single row is taking up in a table. I can then use this as an approximate to work out how much disk space I can recover by removing old unneeded data. Would I have to combine all of the columns in a single SELECT statement, like so?

SELECT DATALENGTH([Id]) + DATALENGTH([Column1]) + DATALENGTH([Column2]) AS 'Size'
  FROM [MyTable]

Or is there a better, more efficient way that I'm not aware of?

EDIT

I have just noticed that if a column has a NULL value, then I get NULL as the result.

Answer 1

How much data do you have?

Personally, I'd do one of

• try it on a test system and check "before" and "after"
• just remove unused data because by definition, it isn't needed

The questions is complicated when you have

• variable length data: how much of the field is used on average?
• page density (rows per page) may not increase therefore you save no space
• indexes duplicate a column value, so you have to count some ones twice

So, I'd do it empirically rather than by calculation...