Quando, nel Self-Paced Training Kit per l'esame 70-431, si parla del comando ALTER PARTITION FUNCTION... SPLIT RANGE, non viene menzionata una cosa importante, ovvero che è necessario che il Partition scheme associato contenga un filegroup per la nuova partizione. Questo fatto viene accennato solo nella parte pratica del capitolo. In questa pagina di MSDN la cosa viene spiegata in dettaglio. In particolare, la nota importante è la seguente:
A filegroup must exist online and be marked by the partition scheme that uses the partition function as NEXT USED to hold the new partition. Filegroups are allocated to partitions in a CREATE PARTITION SCHEME statement. If a CREATE PARTITION SCHEME statement allocates more filegroups than necessary (fewer partitions are created in the CREATE PARTITION FUNCTION statement than filegroups to hold them), then there are unassigned filegroups, and one of them is marked NEXT USED by the partition scheme. This filegroup will hold the new partition. If there are no filegroups marked NEXT USED by the partition scheme, you must use ALTER PARTITION SCHEME to either add a filegroup, or designate an existing one, to hold the new partition. A filegroup that already holds partitions can be designated to hold additional partitions. Because a partition function can participate in more than one partition scheme, all the partition schemes that use the partition function to which you are adding partitions must have a NEXT USED filegroup. Otherwise, ALTER PARTITION FUNCTION fails with an error that displays the partition scheme or schemes that lack a NEXT USED filegroup.