Partitioning

Partitioning

Folks sometimes ask me, “When a table has more indexes, and SQL Server has more decisions to make, does that slow down execution plan generation?” Well, maybe, but the table design choice that really screws you on compilation time is partitioning. If you choose to partition your tables, even tiny simple queries can cause dramatically higher…

Autoparameterized Trivial Queries May Not Get Partition Elimination

Last Updated November 26, 2020

Partitioning

How’s that for a niche topic? You’re probably never going to know this, but since I had to figure it out the hard way, I’m writing this down so I don’t forget it: queries that get trivial optimization may not get partition elimination. This post is going to be a little on the long side…

DBA Training Plan 17: Should You Partition Your Tables?

Last Updated September 2, 2019

DBA Training Plan, Partitioning

In the last episode, I talked about knowing when it’s time to scale out: identifying when our data is getting to be so large that we have to split it across multiple servers, and I explained why that is so challenging. But what about table partitioning – SQL Server’s ability to break up a single…

Partition Level Locking: Explanations From Outer Space

Last Updated November 22, 2017

Development, Locking, Blocking, and Isolation Levels, Partitioning

It’s not that I don’t like partitioning It’s just that most of my time talking about it is convincing people not to use it. They always wanna use it for the wrong reasons, and I can sort of understand why. Microsoft says you can partition for performance. Partitioning large tables or indexes can have the…

Initial Thoughts on 2016 SP1

Last Updated February 13, 2017

In-Memory OLTP (Hekaton), Licensing, Partitioning, SQL Server

A really odd choice I’ve talked a bit about my annoyance with hardware limits for Standard Edition here and here. If you’re a bunch of SQL-savvy developers who understand the Enterprise Edition features that are now available in 2016 SP1, great. You’re a very small minority of shops. I’m talking about places like StackOverflow and…

Partitioned Views: A How-To Guide

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Indexing, Partitioning, SQL Server

This is not about table partitioning If you want to learn about that, there’s a whole great list of links here, and the Best Blogger Alive has a tremendous post on why table partitioning won’t make your queries any faster over here. With that out of the way, let’s talk about partitioned views, and then…

Temporal Tables, Partitioning, and ColumnStore Indexes

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Indexing, Partitioning, SQL Server

This post is mostly a thought experiment The thought was something along the lines of: I have a table I want to keep temporal history of. I don’t plan on keeping a lot of data in that table, but the history table can accumulate quite a bit of data. I want to partition the history…

Why is This Partitioned Query Slower?

Last Updated June 11, 2019

Execution Plans, Partitioning

It’s tempting to think that table partitioning will improve query performance. After all, it’s an Enterprise Edition feature– it must have a lot of magic, right? Table partitioning does have magic for the right situations. It shines when you want to add a large amount of data to a table or remove a large amount…

Filtered Indexes vs. Table Partitioning

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jes Schultz

Indexing, Partitioning, SQL Server

It was a dark and stormy… Oh, wrong story. It was actually a warm, sunny afternoon in Charlotte, NC. I was presenting “Index Methods You’re Not Using” at PASS Summit. In this talk, I discussed how indexed views, filtered indexes, and compressed indexes can improve your query performance by reducing I/O. From stage right, an…

Best Practices + Table Partitioning: Merging Boundary Points

Last Updated February 13, 2017

One of the many best practices for SQL Server’s table partitioning feature is to create “extra” empty partitions around your data. This is explained in SQL Server Books Online in the page on altering a Partition Function: Always keep empty partitions at both ends of the partition range to guarantee that the partition split (before…

SQL Server Table Partitioning Tutorial: Videos and Scripts

Last Updated December 29, 2021

Partitioning, SQL Server, Videos

There’s a secret to learning about SQL Server’s table partitioning feature: you need to get your hands on some code and really play with it in a test environment. In this tutorial, Kendra will walk you through test scripts that set up a sample table partitioning environment. These scripts demonstrate gotchas to look out for…

Potential Problems with Partitioning

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Jeremiah Peschka

Architecture, Partitioning

Getting started with table partitioning is difficult; there are many decisions to make after you’ve decided to partition data. Correctly configuring partitioning is critical to the long term performance and stability of the database from both a querying and data modification standpoint. There are three key considerations that database architects should devote time to before…

Hash Partitioning, SQL Server, and Scaling Writes

Last Updated September 2, 2019

Jeremiah Peschka

At first glance, SQL Server’s partitioning seems like it should be an easy way to solve problems inserting data into busy tables. If the writes are spread across many partitions it only makes sense that we can avoid write hot spots in SQL Server, right? The truth is much more complicated than it appears. Asking…

How To Decide if You Should Use Table Partitioning

Last Updated July 12, 2023

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Great volumes have been written about table partitioning. It’s a complex feature and you can read for days to just understand how you might apply it. But will it improve performance for you? Table partitioning produces great benefits for some applications, but causes giant headaches for others. How do you know if you should invest your…

SQL Server Partitioning: Not the Best Practices for Everything

Last Updated February 13, 2017