Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

VIII.6.3. Setting up Partitioning in Your Environment

Previously in this chapter, I briefly describe SQL Server's partitioning architecture along with details about some of the most relevant terms and concepts you're likely to encounter. Here, I show you how easy it is to set up partitioning for your database.

First, a little background: Assume that you've been tasked with designing and developing an application to store point-of-sale information. Because creativity isn't your organization's strong suit, the database is named point_of_sale. Furthermore, imagine that you're designing a specific table (sales_transactions) that you expect will receive hundreds of millions of records each year. Your organization has grown, and now supports customers in Europe and Asia. Sales transactions will arrive from both of these regions, and you're concerned that they will overwhelm your primary disk drive. Consequently, you purchase and install a high-speed disk array. For the purposes of this simple example, assume that the disk array offers a C: drive and a D: drive, and that you want to place European sales data on drive C, and Asian sales transactions on drive D.

Although you can use SQL Server Management Studio to enable partitioning (see the wizard shown in Figure 6-1), it's actually easier to understand by using a combination of graphical- and character-based techniques.

Figure VIII.6-1. The SQL Server Partition Wizard.

Because partitioning is somewhat complex to comprehend fully, ...