13.6

Suppose your university has a very large number of takes records, accumulated over many years. Explain how table partitioning can be done on the takes relation, and what benefits it could offer. Explain also one potential drawback of the technique.

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The table can be partitioned on (year, semester). Old takes records that are no longer accessed frequently can be stored on magnetic disk, while newer records can be stored on SSD (they could also be stored on storage-class memory like Intel Optanes). Queries that specify a year can be answered without reading records for other years.

A drawback is that queries that fetch records corresponding to multiple years will have a higher overhead, since the records may be partitioned across different relations and disk blocks.