While the previous tutorial illustrates how to partition tables with data, this
scenario covers the usage of partitioned tables and illustrates how to split, merge
and switch partitions.
The table used in this scenario was partitioned in the previous tutorial.
The table TransactionHistory is partitioned by month and includes data for the current
year. Currently there are 13 partitions with data; the lower boundary value of the
first partition with data is September 1st, 2003 and the upper boundary value of
the last partition is October 1st, 2004.
The archive table TransactionHistoryArchive contains a partition with all data before
September 1, 2003, and one partition which is empty.
Operations to do with partitioned tables usually include the following: at the end
of each month, a new partition is added to the already-existing TransactionHistory
table, and the earliest month of data that is currently in the TransactionHistory
table is switched to the TransactionHistoryArchive table. This can be easily done
with SQL Partition Manager.
