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Data & Analytics · Intermediate

Table Partitioning

Dividing a large table into smaller physical pieces by a key such as date, while queries still see a single table.

Definition

Partitioning improves manageability (fast loading and archiving through partition switching or dropping) and performance through partition elimination. BigQuery partitions by ingestion time, date or timestamp column, or integer range. Databricks now favors liquid clustering over Hive-style partitioning for most tables.

Example

BigQuery: CREATE TABLE sales PARTITION BY DATE(order_ts) AS ...

Exam tip

Partition on a column that is commonly filtered and has moderate cardinality, such as date; avoid high-cardinality keys that create tiny partitions.

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