Some queries may get slower after you partition your tables: the SQL Server optimizer doesn’t always use indexes the same way after those indexes are partitioned into chunks.

Table partitioning is a fantastic tool to help you manage tables with skyrocketing rowcounts. SQL Server 2016 SP1 made table partitioning available in Standard Edition, so you may be planning to add partitioning to your database. This course teaches you to use execution plans to troubleshoot regressed queries using partitioned tables. You will learn what “non-aligned” indexes are, how to tell how many partitions a query is really using, and see a variety of methods to speed up your queries.

But table partitioning is useful in some cases!