Re: partitioning question 1

thanks for the prompt response. some comments / questions below :

On Oct 28, 2010, at 10:31 AM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> ...constraint exclusion is able to eliminate table partitions. the I/O advantages of having queries target small subtables are the same as the I/O advantages of clustering the index : result pages in a small range are very close to each other on disk.
>
> Not entirely true. One a clustered index will not stay clustered if you
> are still updating data that is in the partition. You shouldn't
> underestimate the benefit of smaller relations in terms of maintenance
> either.

in my situation, the update come in-order (it is timeseries data and the clustered index is on time.) so the table should remain relatively clustered. updates also happen relatively infrequently (once a day in one batch.) so it appears that we will continue to get the I/O benefits described above.

are there any other benefits which partitioning provides for query performance (as opposed to update performance) besides the ones which i have mentioned?

> Yes the constraints have to be static. Not sure about the operator
> question honestly.

this seems to severely restrict their usefulness -- our queries are data warehouse analytical -type queries, so the constraints are usually data-driven (come from joining against other tables.)

>> is my intuition completely off on this?
>
> You may actually want to look into expression indexes, not clustered
> ones.

what would expression indexes give me?

thanks and best regards, ben