September 2010
Intermediate to advanced
1704 pages
111h 8m
English
A partition function identifies values within a table that will be compared to the column on which you partition the table. As mentioned previously, it is important that you know the distribution of the data and the specific range of values in the partitioning column before you create the partition function. The following query provides an example of determining the distribution of data values in the sales_big table by year:

You can see from the results of the SELECT statement that there are four years’ worth of data in the sales_big table. Because the values specified in the CREATE PARTITION FUNCTION statement are ...