I have been dealing with real-time and near-time VLDB environments housing 500 to 1000 GB for the last 4 years and the following summarizes the size management strategies employed:
- VL table partitioning and recombining with updateable views
- multi-filegroups
- partition per filegroup
- indexes per partition
- weekly full reindexing
- daily stats updates
- archiving by rotating oldest partitions out of a view