Can you enable Flexible Parallelism to an existing database? (Not a new one)

Can you enable Flexible Parallelism to an existing database? (Not a new one)

“This engine variable sets the number of sub-partitions per physical partition that a new database will be created with.”

The article keeps mentioning “a new database”. Can this be turned on for an existing database?

No, you can’t. You need to enable flexible parallelism (FP) before you create the database.

There are limited benefits for some queries if FP is not turned on when you create(d) the database, but in general FP is not enabled. E.g. older databases can do some parallel scan operations at the segment granule size, using more threads than there are partitions, but shard-key-aware operations will not benefit from flexible parallelism. For example, colocated joins cant use FP for non-FP databases.

If you truly want all the benefits of FP on the data in an older database, you will need to migrate the data to a new database.

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Thank You for the reply!

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