Partitioning can provide tremendous benefit to a wide variety of applications by improving performance, manageability, and availability. It is not unusual for partitioning to greatly improve the performance of certain queries or maintenance operations. Moreover, partitioning can greatly simplify common administration tasks.
Partitioning also enables database designers and administrators to solve some difficult problems posed by cutting-edge applications. Partitioning is a key tool for building multi-terabyte systems or systems with extremely high availability requirements.
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