• Hi James, the link to the excellent SQL 2005 partitioning by Kimberly Tripp is http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sql2k5partition.asp, where as the one on SQL 2000 by Joy Mundy is http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa902650(SQL.80).aspx

    Thank you Sam for the useful date converter function. On Oracle and SQL 2005 we deal with VLFT (good acronym, thx) using table partitioning. On SQL 2000 as there is no real partitioning, summary tables, indexing and purging are our weapons. We had a snapshot fact table with 90m rows and treated this with a summary table (which is only 300k rows), purging (leaving daily snapshot data for the last 4 weeks and weekly for last 2 years). Luckily the ETL is not too much of a problem as we maily do insert and no updates.

    Thank you Michelle pointing the two articles for Mike. The URL for my articles is http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/vRainardi. Mike, Data Warehouse Loading is the first in the series, where I describe the general things, then I wrote 1 article focusing on dimension tables and another one focusing on the fact tables. I haven't covered audit, control, restore, MDB and EAI (topic number 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 - see planned content on the DW Loading article) as I've been busy writing a book and another article on using DW for CRM but if a lot of people want it please tell me and I'll write it for you guys.