Re: partitioning question 1

thanks for the prompt response.  some comments / questions below :

On Oct 28, 2010, at 10:31 AM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> ...constraint exclusion is able to eliminate table partitions.  the I/O advantages of having queries target small
subtablesare the same as the I/O advantages of clustering the index : result pages in a small range are very close to
eachother on disk. 
>
> Not entirely true. One a clustered index will not stay clustered if you
> are still updating data that is in the partition. You shouldn't
> underestimate the benefit of smaller relations in terms of maintenance
> either.

in my situation, the update come in-order (it is timeseries data and the clustered index is on time.)  so the table
shouldremain relatively clustered.  updates also happen relatively infrequently (once a day in one batch.)  so it
appearsthat we will continue to get the I/O benefits described above. 

are there any other benefits which partitioning provides for query performance (as opposed to update performance)
besidesthe ones which i have mentioned? 


> Yes the constraints have to be static. Not sure about the operator
> question honestly.

this seems to severely restrict their usefulness -- our queries are data warehouse analytical -type  queries, so the
constraintsare usually data-driven (come from joining against other tables.) 

>> is my intuition completely off on this?
>
> You may actually want to look into expression indexes, not clustered
> ones.


what would expression indexes give me?

thanks and best regards, ben