Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Defining Table Location

As databases scale in size, the physical location of database objects, particularly tables and indexes, becomes crucial. Consider two tables, Authors and Titles, that are always queried together. If they are located on the same physical disk, contention for hardware resources may slow performance. SQL Server addresses this issue by enabling you to specify where a table (or an index) is stored.

The mechanism for specifying the physical table location is the filegroup. Filegroups are aligned to physical data files. By default, each database has a primary filegroup and a data file that matches the name of the database. You can create additional filegroups and align them to other data files. When these filegroups are created, ...