Even though solid-state disks (SSDs) are increasingly replacing hard disks, access to mass storage will always be the slowest process in a database system. Therefore, all database providers search for methods to reduce the number of I/Os.
As of Release 14.10, Teradata provides functions for reducing I/Os, such as column storage, block-level compression, or Teradata Intelligent Memory.

These new features will improve performance, but we would like to point you to a mature method that meets your improvement needs in equal measure:

The partitioned primary index (PPI)

What is a Partitioned Primary Index?

Commonly queried rows are stored together in partitions so that you can restrict data retrieval to those partitions that contain the rows required by your SQL statement. Other partitions that do not have requested rows are not read.

Other database systems, such as Netezza, go the other way around by storing the information about the data blocks where the requested rows are not stored. Netezza called this method “Data Skipping”.

Partitioning will not help avoid table scans, but it will reduce the number of data blocks that each AMP must move to its local memory (FSG cache) because only relevant partitions need to be accessed.

How is Teradata Partitioning implemented?

The idea behind the Teradata Partitioned Primary Index is to keep the records of a table packed together in clearly delineated containers. There are not too many in total about the table’s size. In that sense, partitioning is just a different way of structuring the data records on the disks.

In partitioned tables (PPI Tables), the Primary Index still determines each row’s responsible AMP. Only the way the rows are stored in the data blocks is different: While not partitioned tables keep their rows sorted by rowid only, partitioned tables (PPI tables) store rows first inside the corresponding partitions and only afterward sorted by the rowid.

Whenever a data record is accessed, the AMP’s cylinder index is queried to determine which cylinder the first data block of the accessed partition is located. After positioning at the first data block, all remaining data blocks of the partition (or subpartitions in multi-level partitioning) can be fetched into the FSG cache by scanning in a sequence with a minimum number of disk IO’s.

It is a remarkable technical detail that Teradata internally considers all tables to be partitioned. NPPI tables are nothing else than PPI tables with precisely one partition, namely partition number zero,  containing all table rows.  It would be best to collect statistics on the dummy column PARTITION, even for not partitioned tables. This is used by the optimizer to estimate the table cardinality of NPPI tables.

The process of accessing chunks of data along the partitioning attributes is often called partition elimination. This convention might lead you to believe that an aforementioned excluding approach is in place when, in fact, it is more of a “partition picking” that takes place.

You may wonder in which way partitioning is different from indexing techniques on Teradata.

Maybe the most notable difference is that all Teradata index types consume permanent space. Any Teradata index is a sub-table redundantly storing a subset of columns of its related base table.

While we still experience an impact on the occupied permanent disk space, this is not related to the redundant storage of columns but caused by the overhead of storing the records in a partitioned way: PPI table rows are 2 to 8 bytes wider than the equivalent not partitioned table row. The extra bytes are used to store the internal partition number of each row.

Traditionally, one of the primary applications for a PPI is partitioning by a date. Most reports have a date dimension as part of their reporting filters. Consider a call detail table in telecommunication companies. These are huge tables holding detailed call information about every single call for a particular time frame. Analytics takes place directly on this one big table, and often, along with joins to other tables, it is not mandatory to provide the query result.

Imagine a call detail table containing a full year of data on a daily level, but you only need one day in your report result dataset. If you partition this table by date, each AMP  can restrict access exactly to this one date, i.e., only 1/365 of the rows have to be moved from the disks into the Amp’s memory (FSG cache).

Partitioning should always be considered over other index types if ranges of data records have to be accessed together. Typical workloads are aggregations (“sum up all account balances for my business segment,” etc.), which you often find in reporting requirements.

On the other hand, specific indexing techniques that allow direct access to the data blocks (primary index, unique secondary index, join index with matching primary index definition, etc.) are usually right for OLTP applications (“Give me the customer name for the client where customer id = 123”).

As you can combine partitioned tables with other index types, you can improve usability even further.

Until Teradata Release 12, several restrictions existed if you wanted to partition a table, especially regarding data types. There was no possibility to partition character columns and timestamps. At least there was a workaround for character columns:


With Teradata Release 13.10, character and timestamp column partitioning is possible in a direct way.

Even the system variable CURRENT_DATE can be used in the partitioning statement for timestamps:


Using CURRENT_DATE in your partition statement makes it easy to increase your partitions up to the most current date:

— Delete the rows not matching any partition

— Insert the rows not matching into a backup table

There are three partitioning supported: A simple partitioning by column, the CASE_N syntax, and the RANGE_N syntax.

As the names already indicate, RANGE_N allows you to create ranges of rows that will end up in the same partition, and CASE_N enables you to use the simple CASE … WHEN statement.

Here is one example of an often-used RANGE_N partitioning by date:


As you can see from the above example, two distinct partitions exist that you can add to each table:

All rows not matching any of the defined partitions will end up in the NO RANGE bucket. If you do not specify an UNKNOWN partition and try to insert records not matching any specified partition, you will receive an error message, and the insert will fail.

The UNKNOWN partition is used to hold rows with NULL values in the partition expression.

Here is one example for a CASE_N partitioning:

PARTITION BY CASE_N (MyValue < 1000 MyValue < 2000, MyValue < 3000, NO RANGE, UNKNOWN);

Again, we can add the two particular partitions as required.

CASE_N partitioning should be utilized if you want to group values into partitions.

Partitioning is not restricted to one level. Multi-level partitioning allows the partitioning of tables on more than one level. Here is one example:


Just keep in mind that some partitions are limited. Up to release 13.10 of Teradata, the maximum number of partitions was 65535. Pay attention to the fact that this is the number of combined partitions in multi-level partitioning, and don’t forget to count the NO RANGE and UNKNOWN partitions. You have to multiply the number of partitions on each level to get the overall number of partitions in use. Starting with Teradata 14.10, it is possible to have more than 9.000 Quintillion partitions.
When does Teradata partition elimination take place?

Many misconceptions exist about when partition elimination takes place.

First, you have to distinguish between partition elimination and primary index access. Partition elimination occurs independently of any involvement of the Primary Index in a query.

Although the primary index choice plays a significant role in partition decisions, most of the time, it is the elimination of partitions that accounts for the vast leap in IO reduction.

These are the possible performance patterns for partitioned primary index access. They are dependent on how PI and Partitions are referenced:

teradata ppi

Furthermore, for multi-level partitioning, you do not have to include all partitions in the WHERE condition to cut partitions. Each of the partitions can be addressed independently, which is indeed a very nice feature in Teradata.

Now for the limitations of the primary index choice in the context of partitioning.

Many of us have heard about a performance difference between tables, including all partition columns in the primary index and tables that do not include the partition columns in the primary index. Also, if tables do not have the partitioning columns, the primary index cannot be unique. What’s behind all this?

To understand the relation between primary index uniqueness and partitioning, we have to recall how rows are stored on the disks:

In the first step, the rows are hashed to the responsible AMPs. In the second phase, they are inserted into the proper partitions and sorted by the ROWID.

Imagine a table with a non-unique primary index: Many rows can have the same primary index and will hash to the same AMP. However, each of these rows could belong to a different partition.

In the case of a not partitioned table, all rows with the same hash are stored together. In the event of a partitioned table, the rows are scattered across different partitions.

Now imagine it was allowed to have a partitioned table with a unique primary index without the partition column being part of the primary index. Any update or insert statement would need Teradata to check each partition to avoid the creation of duplicates. Having to check each partition is very inefficient from a performance point of view.

Also, keep in mind that if the primary index is not including the partitioning columns, each time primary index access is required, the responsible AMP has to scan all its partitions for this particular primary index. The scan of all partitions can be avoided if you include the partition columns into the primary index. I consider this a minor problem, more related to OLTP.

Table partitioning has other impacts on performance as well. Especially when joining a non-partitioned and a partitioned table together, Teradata has to apply different join techniques for non-partitioned tables. A Sliding Window merge join is one of the join techniques related to partitioning. Another option is to “de-partition” the partitioned table and doing a regular merge join, or we can partition the table, which is not partitioned.

Similar to the joining of two non-partitioned tables, from a performance point of view, it is best to have the same primary index on both tables, and a join is taking place on all primary index columns and additionally on the partition columns. Anything else requires less efficient join techniques.

Hence, while eliminating partitions may significantly reduce disk IO’s, you have to keep an eye on its join performance impact.

Some more benefits arise when using partitioned tables: The records of complete partitions can be removed from the table with a simple statement and, more importantly, without involving the transaction log:


Finally, here are the “best practice” statistic recommendations for partitioned tables:

  • Table PI
  • Partitioning column(s)
  • Columns in any not partitioned table that are equated to the partitioning column of the partitioned table
  • The system-derived PARTITION dummy column of all partitioned tables

I could convince you that I consider partition elimination an essential tool in the toolkit for performance optimization.

More on indexing & partitioning here:
Teradata Indexing
The Secondary Index in Teradata – The NUSI compendium

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  • Hi Sir,

    Thanks for such beautiful explanation. But I have one doubt.
    In case of UPI, we must include the PI column as part of PPI, but inase of NUPI it’s not mandatory.
    Could you plz help on this.

    • Yes, because of the UPI guarantees already that in each rowhash can be located in only exactly one partition. This is implemented for performance reasons. Imagine an UPDATE statement on a certain rowhash. This would require to probe each partition if the rowhash exists inside the partition in order to avoid the creation of duplicates.

  • Hi,
    thanks for the info. I would like to ask you, if this features (PPI) is available in all the teradata tiers (developer, base, advanced, enterprise) ?
    Many thanks in advance and best regards,

  • Hi

    can I have my primary key and primary index columns different?

    When I am trying to give PK columns different then PI, ETL process failing with database space issue where I have enough space available and if I make PK and PI the same columns the error goes away.

    Please provide any help possible


    • Hi Nirav,

      The primary key and primary index can be different. I assume your problem is that your primary index is skewed, causing that you run out of space on one AMP. The primary key is not skewed by definition as it’s unique and always ensuring even distribution of data rows.

  • Avatar
    Jatin chandna says:

    Which two support multilevel partitioned primary indexes? (Choose two.)
    A. NoPl tables
    B. permanent tables
    C. column-partitioned tables
    D. non-compressed join indexes


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