3362795 - Why do HANA Tables reduce by a large size even when the record count has barely changed ??

• A HANA table's memory & disk size got reduced drastically with no noticeable or big change in record size. Archiving of business data was not carried out either.
• Reduction over a time period  :

HANA_Tables_TopGrowingTables_Size_History_2.00.060+.txt
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|BEGIN_TIME      |END_TIME        |SPACE_LAYER|ST|HOST|PORT |SCHEMA_NAME|TABLE_NAME|SIZE_BEGIN_MB|SIZE_END_MB|SIZE_CHG_MB|CHG_PCT|
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|2023/06/21 03:59|2023/08/02 03:59|DISK       |an|any |  any|any        |ACDOCA    |     81282.76|   37518.47|  -43764.29| -53.84|
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• Last delta merge took place a few days prior, but this isn't what reduced the table size :

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|HOST       |   PORT|TYPE |SCHEMA_NAME|TABLE_NAME| TABLE_OID|PART_ID|INTERNAL_PART_ID|HISTORY|MEMORY_MERGE|PASSPORT|LOG_REPLAY_QUEUE_ID|START_TIME             |RESOURCE_WAIT_TIME|PHASE_1_HESITANT_LOCK_WAIT_TIM|PHASE_1_BLOCKING_LOCK_WAIT_TIM|PHASE_1_LOCK_TIME|PHASE_2_HESITANT_LOCK_WAIT_TIM|PHASE_2_BLOCKING_LOCK_WAIT_TIM|PHASE_2_LOCK_TIME|EXECUTION_TIME|MOTIVATION|SUCCESS|OLD_MAIN_RECORDS|MERGED_MAIN_RECORDS|OLD_DELTA_RECORDS|MERGED_DELTA_RECORDS|NEW_MAIN_RECORDS|
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|Host|31,003 |MERGE|SAPABAP1   |ACDOCA    |3,131,939 |     0 |              0 |FALSE  |FALSE       |        |                 1-|20230729044935395000000|               34 |                            0 |                            0 |             694 |                            0 |                            0 |           4,986 |      955,564 |CRITICAL  |TRUE   |    613,946,319 |       613,821,571 |       1,163,993 |          1,097,403 |    614,918,974 |
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SAP HANA Platform Edition 2.0

SAP HANA Platform Edition 1.0

Table size, Compression, optimize compression, reduced, delta merge, table size reduced  , KBA , HAN-DB , SAP HANA Database , HAN-DB-PER , SAP HANA Database Persistence , Problem