32. Partitioning for manageability (and maybe performance)

Dan Guzman

Large tables are a bane to database administrators (DBAs). It takes seemingly forever to rebuild indexes on tables with many millions or billions of rows, not to mention the exorbitant space required to do so. For example, you must maintain more than 1 terabyte (TB) of database free space just to rebuild the clustered index on a 1 TB table, because both the old and new index must coexist until the rebuild is done. Developers are challenged to design applications that can load, purge, or archive vast amounts of data efficiently while providing high data availability.