Chapter 8. Partitioning for Manageability
Back in Chapter 3, two critical points were made: Fact tables are so large that your success will largely hinge on their implementation, and fact tables should be partitioned to improve their manageability, not for quicker end-user ad-hoc queries or faster data load times.
I find that most DBAs eagerly partition their facts since it seems intuitively obvious that anything that large should be partitioned. However, they often partition their facts for the wrong reasons, and sometimes using the wrong, or even the worst, partitioning criteria. About half do so to improve query response times. The belief is that the best queries are those done in parallel against partitioned and sub-partitioned tables. But ...
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