Answer by Blackhawk-17

Denormalizing your tables and adding a date to the other two is one option. This won't change the schema from the developers point of view and their queries will still work. If size and backups are your only concern then you can use different partition functions for the other two tables - on the JOIN criteria for instance. The third discussion is whether aged data is relevant to queries going forward where you could then move stale data to archive tables. It depends on your goals and the interplay between tables.