[Lozzer]

Metadata operations on partitions can be very fast. One simple example is date based housekeeping. Deleting a month of data will be quite intensive on most databases, whereby dropping a partition from the table is effectively instant.

Partion switching is also fast. Say you have a summary table that is rolled up by month, but you want to recalculate the summaries every so often. You can build a month into a new table and then switch the new table for a partition in the summary table.

[CWuestefeld]

When the circumstances allow it ('cause there are some limitations on where it can be used), this pattern is HUGE. We've got a few places in our system that do this, and the optimization achieved an improvement of a couple orders of magnitude.