As you decide to partition a table, consider the following question regarding the maintenance of your tables:
Is the cost of doing maintenance too high to perform at the table level either because of the amount of time it takes to perform the operation on the entire table or because of the down time required?
If so, it is a good candidate for partitioning since the amount of maintenance required is restricted to the partition level, there is less to do in one maintenance “chunk”. Additionally, data that does not change does not require as much maintenance as data that is constantly in flux and maintenance operations are more efficient at the partition level and allows concurrent access to a partition while a different partition for the same table is under maintenance. All these benefits increase the availability of the data.
Is the cost of doing maintenance too high to perform at the table level either because of the amount of time it takes to perform the operation on the entire table or because of the down time required?