Treating Tables Like Legos: Partitioning basics ~ Brandon Leach

Do you have tables and indexes that have grown really large? Are you moving around a lot more data than you used to? Are your windows for jobs and maintenance getting tighter? If you answered yes to any of these questions, partitioning may be for you!

With partitioning, you can break a table or index down into smaller more manageable chunks. It can help you perform maintenance on just part of a table or index. You can even move data in and out of tables with quick and easy metadata-only operations.

We’ll go over basic partitioning concepts such as horizontal vs. vertical partitioning, and techniques like partitioned views and full blown table partitioning. We’ll also look at how partitioning affects things under the hood. Finally, you'll see some cool demos/tricks around index maintenance and data movement.

At the end of this session, you’ll have a firm understanding of how partitioning works and be able to make decisions on how and when to partition.

You'll learn…
• The components of table partitioning and how they fit together • How to make your index maintenance partition aware
• How Partition elimination can help your queries
• How to split different parts of tables over different storage tiers • How to manage partitions. We'll demo this by implementing the sliding window technique.