Determining the Partitioning Granularity - Advanced SQL Engine - Teradata Database

SQL Data Definition Language Detailed Topics

Product
Advanced SQL Engine
Teradata Database
Release Number
17.05
17.00
Published
June 2020
Language
English (United States)
Last Update
2021-01-24
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dita:id
B035-1184
lifecycle
previous
Product Category
Teradata Vantage™

The key guideline for determining the optimum granularity for the partitions of a partitioned table is the nature of the workloads that most commonly access the partitioned table or join index. The higher the number of partitions you define for a table or join index, the more likely an appropriate range query against the database object will perform more quickly, given that the partition granularity is such that the Optimizer can eliminate all but 1 partition.

On the other hand, it is generally best to avoid specifying too fine a partition granularity. For example if query workloads never access data at a granularity of less than one month, there is no benefit to be gained by defining partitions with a granularity of less than one month. Furthermore, unnecessarily fine partition granularity is likely to increase the maintenance load for a partitioned table, which can lead to degradation of overall system performance. In the end, even though too fine a partition granularity itself does not itself introduce performance degradations, the underlying maintenance on such a table can indirectly degrade performance.