The Wizard's Wand to Partitioning! Series Prelude

Hello Everybody! Its a pleasure to start blogging on this wonderful sunny morning at Seattle when the morning mist says good bye and the sun is happy to shine right above us. Everyone is smiling as the weather just turned from wet to pleasant. This is the exact feeling one will get when they see the partitioning wizard in SQL Server 2008 Management studio. Understanding to partition a table based on certain business requirement has always been a tough thing. Just when the business decision has been made, and you think you have got the answers, the path to perform partitioning with the best practices in mind, the journey becomes even harder. But I am sure all tough things get solved well, if the begining is great.

This wizard is exactly there to address this problem. It is a great tool for beginners to play with partitioning as well as a great tool for advanced users to generate the required scripts in no time. In the days to come, you would see the series of blogs on various tasks that you can perform as part of partitioning. The series will be titled The Wizard's Wand to Partitioning. Watch out the series.

Can you tell me from where I can launch this wizard from?

Open Management studio, Connect to any yukon or Katmai server. Reach a table node and right click. You will see a storage menu. Under the storage sub menu you have the entry point , to the partitioning and compression wizard.

 

 

 What are the various options under storage menu for?

Create Partition : This wizard will help you partition an unpartitioned table. You can select the partition key column, create a partition function, create partition scheme and subsequently partition the table in a very easy way.

Manage Partition: This wizard helps you create staging table for switch out and switch in of partitions and manage

ing the sliding window scenario for your sliding window based partitioned table.

Manage Compression: This wizard will help you manage the compression mechanism for existing table partitions.