Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Switching Table Partitions

One of the great features of table partitions is that they enable you to instantly swap the contents of one partition to an empty table, the contents from a partition on one table to a partition in another table, or an entire table’s contents into another table’s empty partition. This operation performs changes only to metadata in the system catalogs for the affected tables/partitions, with no actual physical movement of data.

For you to switch data from a partition to a table or from a table into a partition, the following criteria must be met:

The source table and target table must both have the same structure (that ...