better table management (partitions?)

Hi,

For my work I am now learning Sql server 2005 and I have been given a database that has been set up by someone else to work with. It is my job to get the database ready for use in reports.

My problem is that the current database has one huge table with almost 8GB of data. The table contains data from 2004 to present (and growing) from 14 different countries. The reports we use are mostly per country, but we also want to compare the 14 countries to eachother for say, whole 2006. At the moment the table is stored in one single file instead of using partitions.

I believe partitions can give a good performance boost when running the queries. But how do I do this? Currently the country codes are just plain text, can they be used for partitions?

Any advice would be welcome,

Thanks!

It sounds like you could benefit from partitioning. You can learn more here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sql2k5partition.asp

If this post answers your question, make sure you mark it "answered" so others can find it quickly.

Thanks -

Buck Woody
http://www.buckwoody.com

|||

Thanks for your reply.

The table has over 5 million records and is still growing, so partitioning seems nice.

However, they are using SQL 2005 standard edition, while only enterprise can use partitioning.

Are there any other ways to make the queries run faster?

|||

Use the Database Tuning Advisor in SQL Server 2005 to see if there are any changes you can make to help. There's a full article about that here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173494.aspx

Buck Woody