Category: Partitioning

Kendra Little has a video on table partitioning:

Learn why SQL Server’s table partitioning feature doesn’t make your queries faster– and may even make them slower.

In this 20 minute video, I’ll show you my favorite articles, bugs, and whitepapers online to explain where table partitioning shines and why you might want to implement it, even though it won’t solve your query performance problems.

Articles discussed are by Gail Shaw, Remus Rusanu, and the SQL Customer Advisory Team (SQLCAT). Scroll down below the video for direct links to each resource.

Check out the video.

Paul White shows us a scenario in which attempts to update a writable partition could fail:

The where clause is exactly the same as before. The only difference is that we are now (deliberately) setting the partitioning column equal to itself. This will not change the value stored in that column, but it does affect the outcome. The update now succeeds (albeit with a more complex execution plan):

The optimizer has introduced new Split, Sort, and Collapse operators, and added the machinery necessary to maintain each potentially-affected nonclustered index separately (using a wide, or per-index strategy).

Read on for the reason why this happens, as well as a few solutions.

Kendra Little shows that truncating partitions in SQL Server 2016 requires all indexes be aligned to the partition:

If you have a non-aligned index on the table, you’ll see an error like this:

Msg 3756, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

TRUNCATE TABLE statement failed. Index ‘ix_FirstNameByBirthDate_pt_BirthYear_FirstNameId_nonaligned’ is not partitioned, but table ‘FirstNameByBirthDate_pt’ uses partition function ‘pf_fnbd’. Index and table must use an equivalent partition function.

This isn’t a bug, and it makes total sense from a logical point of view. “Non-aligned” indexes are not partitioned like the base table is– by definition they are either partitioned differently, or not partitioned at all. The chunk of data that you’re trying to truncate isn’t all in an easily identifiable partition that can be quickly marked as “data non grata”. There’s just no way to do a simple truncate when the data’s scattered all around.

Ideally, all indexes on a partitioned table would be partition-aligned, as it makes maintenance a lot easier.  That’s not always possible, though, so keep this in mind.

Kendra Little shows that DATETIME2 implicit conversion can prevent partition elimination:

SQL Server is implicitly converting my date value to DATETIME2(7). That is a larger, more precise value than the data type I have in the table–FakeBirthDateStamp is DATETIME2(0).

That data type mismatch is preventing partition elimination!

This is a nasty issue to catch in production, especially after you spend a bunch of time arguing with devs that DATETIME2 is the way of the future, that it’s better because of the variable precision, etc.

Kendra Little has a few questions to ask before you set up sliding-window partitioning:

Map this out before you write the code. When will the jobs run, and what should happen if they fail? Should someone be engaged? What tools will they need, and when is the Service Level Agreement for when the process has to be complete? You’ll need lots of details on this to make sure your automation and documentation meet the bar.

Partitioning is an extra layer of complexity.  It can be a very useful extra layer of complexity, but this is a case where it’s best to spend an hour before you begin and walk through potential issues.  Those potential issues will come—automation jobs will fail, external configuration changes will affect your partition strategy, bad data will sneak in and fill up your supposedly-empty edge partitions.

Aaron Bertrand shows us how to partition on the cheap:

The TL;DR of this is that you can use filtered indexes to keep all of your “hot data” in a separate physical structure, and even on separate underlying hardware (you may have a fast SSD or PCIe drive available, but it can’t hold the whole table).

Using filtered indexes is an interesting way of solving issues that partitioning normally would help you out with.  I’m looking forward to the next part in the series.