A SQL Database resides on a physical server shared with many other SQL Databases. This sharing leads to resource constraints on the maximum size and operational throughput of a SQL Database. No data can be written to a SQL Database that has reached its maximum size. Connections are terminated when operational throughput limits are breached. It is therefore important that SQL Database usage is measured to avoid the consequences of hitting resource constraints. SQL Database exposes various dynamic management views that can be queried to measure resource usage.

The SQL Database allocates one partition for a table and one partition for each nonclustered index in a database. As the SQL Database manages the physical allocation of a database, it does not provide operations that support partition management. However, the sys.dm_db_partition_stats dynamic management view contains one row for each partition allocated in the database. Consequently...