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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
When SQL 2005 was in beta, I clapped my hands and jumped for joy the first time I played with partitioning. I’ve done a lot of data warehouse work, and partitioning lets the DBA break down massive tables into smaller, easy-to-manage chunks. We can put heavily accessed parts of the table onto fast storage, and…
