Does SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition support table partitioning?

Question

I want to upgrade my SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition to SQL Server 2016 Standard Edition; however, one database makes use of table partitions over multiple file groups (used on a large logging table, each day is a partition)

I see in Editions and Supported Features for SQL Server 2016 under the section "RDBMS Scalability and Performance", that it says that Standard Edition supports Table and index partitioning, but it does not support Partitioned Table Parallelism.

I am not sure that I fully understand the consequences of this.

What exactly does it mean in my case, and how will it affect the database's performance?

Answer 1

Starting with SQL Server 2016 SP1 the Standard Edition supports all functionality most programming surface of the Enterprise Edition, as announced here: SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1) released !!!.

Quoted from that article:

The following table compares the list of features which were only available in Enterprise edition which are now enabled in Standard, Web, Express, and LocalDB editions with SQL Server 2016 SP1. This consistent programmatically surface area allows developers and ISVs to develop and build applications leveraging the following features which can be deployed against any edition of SQL Server installed in the customer environment. The scale and high availability limits do not change, and remain as–is for lower editions as documented in this MSDN article.

What still differentiates EE from SE are primarily performance and administrative improvements.

So, in your case, SE will support table partitioning (functionality) but will not leverage certain performance enhancements available on partitioning, like 'partitioned table parallelism'.

Answer 2

The latest SQL release from SQL Server 2016 SP1 onwards supports Partitioning on all editions.

https://www.sqlshack.com/sql-server-2016-enhancements-truncate-table-table-partitioning/

This article is applicable on SQL 2016 SP1.