I recently got a table partitioning question from a reader:
We now need to load some historical data into the table for 2013 so I want to alter the function and schema to add monthly partitions for this. But I can’t work out how to do this using SPLIT? Every example and tutorial I’ve looked at shows how to add new partitions onto the end of a range, not split one in the middle.
Table Partitioning in SQL Server has a bit of a learning curve. It’s tricky to just figure out how much data you have and where the data is stored.
Before you do all the work to map out a complex sliding window table partitioning scheme for your SQL Server tables, here’s the top five questions I’d think through carefully:
Some folks think they need partitioning for performance– but it really shines as a data management feature. Just because you’ve got tables with millions of rows in them doesn’t necessarily mean that partitioning will make queries faster. Make sure you’ve worked through traditional indexing and query re-writes first. Partitioning is lots of work, so don’t skip this question.
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