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copied!<p>old thread, i know, but here is what makes sense to me: back in the day max file size in windows filesystem FAT32 was 2GB. If your database-file got bigger you were screwed (happened to me with a MS Access-Database once). Hence they allowed to define a max filesize (like: 2GB) and You could add more files. If your database grew and the max size got exceeded the next file got filled until that was full and so on. All those files can be addressed as one filegroup. You can define a tables data-location by choosing a filegroup, but you don't see in which file within that filegroup the tabledata will end up. All You know is that your tables data can end up in any of the files within the filegroup. By this "splitting" Your filesystem never sees a file larger than the max filesize (here: 2GB) although tables in Your Database can be many times larger. Today setting up multiple files can be useful to have large datafiles "chopped" into smaller pieces for filebased backup (ask your network admins what they want, because during backup writing a large (like 1TB) file into a partition takes long, even in fast RAID. All other writing operations would need to wait a long time. Shorter waiting intervals let high prioritized operations come to execution quicker). If You care for parallel access of the same table consider horizontal partitioning as in <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188730%28v=sql.105%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188730%28v=sql.105%29.aspx</a>. this allows to spread the data of a table over different harddisks, like "all sales of January on disk R:", "all sales of February on disk S:", without creating separate tables. During the procedure of partitioning of a table You can define which part shall go to what filegroup. </p>

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