Database size variation

[Chris Johnson]

I have a script that logs into a firewall, exports the session table, 
parses it and writes a subset of the data to a database. Each session is 
a doc in the database. Currently, because of the way the database is 
exported, it is serialized and each doc is written to the database one 
by one. The database that is generated is extremely large. For example, 
the last database had 1.5M documents. As part of this process, the most 
recent database is replicated to another database witha known name.

One thing I just noticed is the replicated database is significantly 
smaller in size. As an example, the database that I referred to above is 
11+ Gig in size, but the replicated database is only 4 Gigs. Everything 
between the two databases appears to be consistent and the number 
records/update sequences are identical, so why such a variation in size?

Chris