Zone maps and rolling history

Zone maps take advantage of the inherent ordering of data and are beneficial for large grouped or nearly ordered data. This type of data is common in call records, web logs, and financial transaction databases.

Ordered table data might contain rolling history data that represents many months or years of activity. A rolling history table typically contains many records. Each day, the new data is inserted and the data for the oldest day is deleted. Because these rows are historical in nature, they are rarely, if ever, modified after insertion.

Typically, users run queries against a subset of history such as the records for one week, one month, or one quarter. To optimize query performance, zone maps help to eliminate scans of the data that is outside the range of interest.