Partitioning a table with RANGE LEFT
Let's suppose that you are required to design a database and there is one particular table that is expected to contain millions of rows. To improve the performance, you decide to partition this particular table based on ID column (identity column) in such a way that each partition contains a certain number of rows, rather than having all the millions of rows in one single table. Initially, you decide to start with four partitions, so that they contain rows as follows:
Partition 1: Rows with ID values greater than or equal to 0
Partition 2: Rows with ID values from 1 to 1,000,000
Partition 3: Rows with ID values from 1,000,001 to 2,000,000
Partition 4: Rows with ID values from 2,000,001 to 3,000,000
However, in our case, partition 1 is never going to contain any rows, because the value in the ID column will start from 1, increasing by 1, and partition 1 will always remain empty; it is still a good idea to have this partition range for scalability and the future...