This is where dbms' designed for data warehouses might come into play, something like SybaseIQ. It is adapted for long term storage and retrieval.

If you understand the finer details of schema design for data warehousing such as star schemas and snowflake schemas then you will probably have more luck shoving your SNMP poll data into an SQL database. But it is still a question of making do with a suboptimal database that is not designed for dealing with huge time-series datasets. --Michael Dillon