Introduction

If data in a database table keeps growing and the number of records in a table reaches a count in billions or more, data retrieval and data manipulation operations on such a large table may become difficult. Due to very huge data, even simple INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE operations can take a long time. Tasks such as deleting certain old data and rebuilding indexes become hard to perform. Managing and maintaining query performance becomes a challenge in this situation.

In the olden days of SQL Server, with versions prior to 2005, you might have worked with partitioned views to deal with huge amount of data. With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft introduced a great feature named Table Partitioning, which allows us to divide our data horizontally, into multiple partitions. SQL Server also allows us to put these multiple partitions on multiple disks by configuring them with multiple filegroups. This greatly improves the performance of queries when retrieving data in a certain fashion, because...