Partitioning table that is typically only inserted to in SQL Server 2012

Question

I have a table that is having approximately 450,000 records per month going into it. It is an audit table of sorts that tracks changes to other tables in the database. That is, inserts, updates and deletes of records. Typically this table is not queried (perhaps only 2-3 times per month to examine how data in other tables changed and under very specific circumstances)

It has been put to me that we should consider partitioning this table to help improve database performance. If the table is only being inserted to 99.9% of the time and rarely queried, would there be any tangible benefit to this partitioning this table?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If the table is only being inserted to 99.9% of the time and rarely queried, would there be any tangible benefit to this partitioning this table?

Partitioning is mostly a manageability feature. I would expect no difference in insert performance with or without able partitioning. For SELECT queries, partitioning may improve performance of large scans if partitions can be eliminated (ie partitioning column specified in WHERE clause, but indexing and query tuning is usually the key to performance.

Partitioning can improve performance of purge operations. For example, you could use a monthly sliding window to purge an entire month of data at once rather than individual row deletes. I don't know if that's with the trouble with only 450K rows/month, though.

Answer 2

I think you want to get fast access to your recent data. Add date column as first column in primary key clustered instead of partioning