In today’s world, where every company, big or small is highly dependent on the data they generate and accumulate, its very important to maintain and organize your data in the right manner. With organizations generating and accumulating vast amounts of data daily it becomes increasingly challenging to manage and maintain performance across critical systems. This is where data archival becomes not just a strategy, but a necessity.
Data archival is nothing but a strategy to efficiently the data life cycle within the organization where the historical and inactive data is moved to long term storage These archival tables are not frequently used and are used to maintain the backup of the data. Data archival is the unsung hero that keeps the wheels of modern enterprises turning smoothly.
So, let’s say, your company has decided to archive the historical data from the Database and maintain only the active and frequently used data within the system. There are multiple ways that data can archived and moved from active tables to archival tables. One of the strategies that we will cover today is partition switching. It’s considered to be one of the most efficient and effective method. Let’s understand why.
Partition switching is a metadata-only operation. This means that SQL Server does not physically move the data rows from one table or partition to another. Instead, it simply updates the metadata to indicate that the rows previously associated with one partition are now associated with another partition.
Let’s consider the following example.
You have 2 tables. One is the Transactional table and other is the Archival table. Now the transactional table consists of huge amount of data, and you want to move the old/inactive data to the archival table, it can be done as follows.
For eg: The partition 1 of Transaction_table defines the range to be between ‘2024-08-01’ and ‘2024-08-31’ i.e. for the month of august then the range defined for the partition of the Archival_table should also be the same.
Take the following example: I have a table which has 3 partitions, and I want to switch the data present in the first partition to another table.
Now, when I Run the syntax for partition switching, within no time, the data will move from your main table to archival table.
As you can see the data moved from the table to another within milliseconds. I have considered a very small dataset, but with even large data, the operation does not take much time.
Now, if you see the data is no longer present in the main table, it has been moved to the archival table.
Hence, partition switching is a simple, yet effective way to move your data, without affecting the performance of the database. The advantages and disadvantages of partition switching are as follows:
Advantages of partition switching: –
Disadvantages of partition switching: –
Hope with this article, you now have a clear understanding of what partition switching is and how it can be used effectively for data archival. Hoping this acts a guide for you when you want to apply partition switching in your environment.
Until next time!!
Yatika Sheth