1. A method implemented in a computer-readable medium and to execute on a processing device to perform the method, comprising: identifying data extents having infrequent use within a database table by comparing database statistics for the database table against a policy defining infrequent use as those data extents that were not accessed within a predefined number of days and the database statistics identifying when the data extents were last accessed in the database table, the data extents are just unused portions of a particular single database field within the database table where other portions of the single database field are used and not identified as the data extents and the data extents are pieces of data contiguously recorded in memory or storage and not fragmented for the database table and the data extents are identified as used data structures on file cylinders that have pieces of data with gaps or filler that separate each data extent on the file cylinders wherein a frequency of access for a particular data extent is compared to other data extents for the database table on access to the database table; acquiring file system metadata for the database table; selectively compressing the portions of the metadata and portions of the data extents, wherein the data extents are identified as alignment between fields in a row of the database table and alignment between rows in the database table, the portions of the metadata compressed via a lossless compression and the portions of the data extents compressed using lossy compression.