I had to configure a data file in a very large database this one time and I used Management Studio for that. The file size I was aiming at was 3TB (a very large database indeed). I was quite surprised to see that SSMS has a limit to the size you can configure, which was 2,097,152 MB (i.e. roughly 2TB). I thought I was missing something here and quickly turned to SQL Server Maximum Capacity Specifications to see how big a data file can get, and to found out it is 16TB, not 2TB (the transaction log...
When you work with large tables in SQL Server 2005 and 2008, you will inevitably start using partitioned tables in order to ease the maintenance of these tables, and improve query performance. I recently wanted to merge several partitions at the tail of an existing partition function, and I wanted to understand whether I need to merge the partitions in a sequential order from the last partition and work my way up the chain of partitions, or would it be better to start from the newest partition (that...