New dress for Christmas

So this week there was this small fire around running out of partitions.  Because I had to learn how all of it works really fast, I need to write it down before I forget.  I was getting a range doesn’t exist error so here is what I did:

I already had my file groups created.  If you don’t do that before you move on.

Find what partition schemes and functions you have in your database:

SELECT * FROM sys.partition_schemes

SELECT * FROM sys.partition_functions

(Hint: the fanout is the last range so that can help you identify which one is failing.)

Next, see what your current ranges look like:

SELECT sprv.value AS [Value], sprv.boundary_id AS [ID]
FROM sys.partition_functions AS spf
INNER JOIN sys.partition_range_values sprv ON sprv.function_id = spf.function_id
WHERE (spf.name = N'PartitionFunctionName')
ORDER BY [ID] ASC

Now we are going to split out our partitions one at a time.  Even if you need to add 5 or more ranges, this is an easy step to do one at a time.  Also, you can only split a range into to pieces at a time, so just run the whole query for each range you want to add.

ALTER PARTITION SCHEME [PartitionScheme] NEXT USED [YourFileGroup]

ALTER PARTITION FUNCTION [PartitionFunction]() SPLIT RANGE (N'NewRange')

This should get you back on track.

Happy Trails!