Modifying Fragmentation Strategies

You can make two general types of modifications to a fragmented table. The first type consists of the modifications that you can make to a nonfragmented table. Such modifications include adding a column, dropping a column, changing a column data type, and so on. For these modifications, use the ALTER TABLE statements that you would normally use on a nonfragmented table. The second type of modification consists of changes to a fragmentation strategy. This section explains how to use SQL statements to modify fragmentation strategies.

At times, you might need to alter a fragmentation strategy after you implement fragmentation. Most frequently, you will need to modify your fragmentation strategy when you use fragmentation with intraquery or interquery parallelization. Modifying your fragmentation strategy in these circumstances is one of several ways you can improve the performance of your database server system.