Re: Partitioning Best Practices

You have to ask how likely it is that partition maintenance will be delayed for some reason, and what the impact of that will be.

For partitioning based on dates, where I know that values won't be created for future dates, I *always* include an overflow partition with MAXVALUE.

The upside of this is that the application won't fail because it has run out of partitions. Given that my number one priority is to have a working application, this is a good thing.

The downside is that my partition maintenance is a bit more complex. However, this shouldn't matter, because I do my partition maintenance before the overflow partition has any data in it, so I can just drop it and add the new partitions. If partition maintenance slips past that date and there *is* data in the overflow partition, then I have a bit more work to do, but that's better than having the application fail.

• Phil