Hi Nate,
Thank you for your question. The concept of table partitioning falls into the category of disk and file management for the database. As such, it would be allowable under our Database Use Policy, and would not require a modification agreement.
Theoretically, partitioning a table can increase the speed of maintenance by causing maintenance operations to target subsets of the table rather than the entire table. It can also improve your query performance in certain scenarios. For example, joining between partitioned tables can be faster when the partitioning columns in the tables are the same, because the partitions themselves can be joined by the query optimizer.
However, these benefits can only be gained if table partitions are properly configured. It is important that you understand what problems you are hoping to solve by implementing table partitioning, since poor configurations may actually slow query performance by forcing SQL Server to perform disk access more frequently. Partitioning requires an experienced DBA with an understanding of how to appropriately create and maintain the table partitions. As with any change to the database, this should also be implemented first in a test environment.
I hope that this explanation has helped. If you have any more thoughts or questions, please let us know.
Thanks,
