SQL Server® 2008 Administration: Real World Skills for MCITP Certification and Beyond

Data Partitioning

The performance of very large tables can suffer even on the most powerful of servers. Let's define a very large table as any table that is too large to be handled efficiently by the server on which it operates. The example table could have an arbitrary number of rows, say 2,000,000, but that's all it would be—an arbitrary number. An eight-socket dual-core server with each core running at more than 2GHz while providing 32GB of RAM might handle multiple tables of 2,000,000 rows just fine. However, a single-socket dial-core server running at more than 2GHz while providing 4GB of RAM could perform very poorly with such large tables.

Whatever the size of any given table, if it is causing poor performance, you have two options when ...