I have a very large, non-partitioned, transactionally replicated table in a 3rd party database that that I administrate but cannot alter.
Although I cannot change the publisher, I would like to partition this table on the subscriber. I've found quite a bit of documentation related to keeping the partitioning of a table that was already setup that way on the publisher but I have not seen anything related to doing this.
I'm not so much concerned about the mechanics of doing it as I am about long term ramifications that might bite me.
Has anyone had success doing this or am I going to wind up hating myself 3 months from now?
When defining a Publication you can set an option not to replicate Partition Scheme and Function. You can choose it on New Publication Wizard or the Publication Properties dialog box. Or use SP to set @schema_option variable (0x40000 ,0x80000 ,0x100000 - table, function, schema)
[sp_addarticle][1] or [sp_changearticle][2] for transactional replication
sp_addmergearticle or sp_changemergearticle for merge replication
Further reading: Replicate Partitioned Tables and Indexes