Improved Concurrency for Partition-Level Online Operations

Certain partition-level operations can concurrently operate on different partitions of a table. DML can also concurrently operate on the table while the partition level online operation is running.

These include:

alter table … split partition
alter table … merge partition
alter table … move partition
alter table … drop partition
truncate partition
dbcc checkindex
dbcc checktable
dbcc tablealloc
dbcc indexalloc

Partition-Level Online Operation Syntax
To allow for greater data availability, alter table and truncate partition commands include the with online sub-clause in the partition clause.
Concurrency with Partition-Level Online Operations
Multiple partition-level online operations can be executed concurrently on different partitions of a table.
Partition-Level Online Operations with Global Index
Partition-level operations behavior for a table having a global index.
Schema Locks
Schema locks allow enhanced partition-level operations to update table schema or metadata by achieving isolation from concurrent operations.

Parent topic: Increased Data Availability with Partition Locking