Question

My team is trying to run a script that is in source control to create partitions and we’re running into the following error: CREATE/ALTER partition function failed as only a maximum of 1000 partitions can be created.

Part of script:

CREATE PARTITION FUNCTION [PFDailyPartition](DATETIME)
    AS RANGE RIGHT FOR VALUES ('01/01/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/02/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/03/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/04/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/05/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/06/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/07/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/08/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/09/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/10/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/11/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/12/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/13/2005 00:00:00'
 '01/14/2005 00:00:00'
 etc...

Running select * from sys.partition_range_values on our current setup shows that we have over 10,000 partitions.

Is there any way to get around this 1000 limit? We can’t figure out how we have this many partitions already.

Could it be an environmental difference between the two setups?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Your partition function is creating separate partitions by day. That’s a lot of partitions! Since 2005, this would be roughly 365 * 7 = 2,555 partitions. Do you realy want separate partitions by day?

According to this article, SQL Server 2008 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 increased the limit to 15,000 partitions. Is there a service pack difference between the servers?

Quoted from the article:

Problem

SQL Server 2005 introduced table and index partitioning. Partitioning
can make large tables and indexes more manageable and scalable. For
more information about partitioning, see Partitioned Tables and
Indexes
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188706(v=SQL.100).aspx). In
SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 R2, the number
of partitions is limited to 1,000.

Customers primarily use partitioning to facilitate the management of
large fact tables in data warehouses. Data warehouse customers
commonly load data as a batch. Daily loads are the most common
pattern, but increasingly customers want to load data more than once a
day. With the limit of 1,000 partitions, if customers load daily, they
can store less than three years of data in a partitioned table,
whereas business requirements often mandate that data be retained for
longer periods of time, such as seven years. The 1,000 partitions
maximum becomes a limitation for customers in this scenario.

If merging of partitions is too complex and time-consuming, customers
prefer to have the flexibility to create a large number of partitions
and use them as and when required. The 1,000 partitions maximum also
becomes a limitation in this scenario.

Solution

In SQL Server 2008 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1, you can choose to
enable support for 15,000 partitions at a database-level granularity
by using the new sp_db_increased_partitions stored procedure. You can
also disable support on a database (after it has been enabled) and set
the limit on the number of partitions back to 1,000.