[chime]

> For example, if a current month of data is primarily used for INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE operations while previous months are used primarily for SELECT queries, managing this table may be easier if it is partitioned by month. This benefit can be especially true if regular maintenance operations on the table only have to target a subset of the data. If the table is not partitioned, these operations can consume lots of resources on an entire data set. With partitioning, maintenance operations, such as index rebuilds and defragmentations, can be performed on a single month of write-only data, for example, while the read-only data is still available for online access.

The "General Ledger Entry" table in most accounting systems ends up being millions to billions of rows. Except for rare circumstances, prior periods are read-only due to business rules.