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.
You’re designing table partitioning, or you want to make a change to an existing partition function. It’s critical to understand the difference between how “left” and “right” partition functions behave, but the documentation is a bit confusing on this topic.
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.
Table partitioning seems simple, but there’s a lot of complexity in designing and managing it if you decide to use filegroups and splitting.
When you first implement partitioning in this scenario, you decide where you’re going to keep “out of bound” data when you create your partition scheme. Be careful when you make that decision, because it may not be easy to change later.
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