Using Partitions With Date Range Question

I've got a transaction table that we'd like to only keep the last 13 months for and thought that partitions would be the way to set this up (i.e. each partition would contain a month's worth of data and we could drop the oldest partition each new month).

1.Is there any performance loss if I set up monthly partitions for the next 5 years or so? These partitions would be empty for some time, so would it be better to set them up on a month-to-month basis?

2. Is there a performance loss if a query goes across 2 or more partitions? I'm hoping that the answer is no and that this would be the same as hitting 2 or more extents but I can't seem to get much info on this.

3. Is this the best way to do this? Received on Fri Jun 16 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT