Table Partitioning: Secret Weapon for Big Data Problems

Table partitioning allows administrators to divide large tables into smaller, more manageable partitions. This allows maintenance tasks like backups, index rebuilds and statistics updates to be performed on individual partitions rather than entire tables. It also improves query performance by allowing the optimizer to eliminate partitions that are not needed to satisfy a query. A sliding window technique uses partition splits and merges to automate moving old data into archive partitions with minimal data movement, improving purging and archiving processes.