Buffer pools and partitioning

I have a very large transaction table (hundreds of millions of rows) which has a  single index.
I need to perform fast inserts to this table (2000 - 2500/sec) and I can allocate approx 1GB RAM from the KEEP pool to the index blocks. After a few days, this index grows beyond 1GB of blocks, and it starts to age required blocks from other objects out of KEEP. This is how I want to fix it :
- Add a new column to the table, type DATE, default SYSDATE

• All apps nominate columns when selecting, so it will NEVER be selected
• Partition by range on this column with each day in a new partition.
• Make its index local
• ALTER the index segment for todays partition BUFFER_POOL KEEP
• At rollover EOD, create a new partition, alter yesterdays index partition RECYCLE, and mark the new index partition KEEP.

My Question is : will oracle age yesterdays index segments out when it requires blocks in the KEEP pool ;
effectively reusing yesterdays index blocks to build today's index? Does Oracle check the current storage parameters
for an object before it decides whether or not to age one of its block out of cache - i.e. does altering an object from buffer_pool  KEEP to buffer_pool recycle have any effect when the block is already in the KEEP pool?

The other objects in KEEP dont roll over, and must not be aged out under any circumstances, but I need to have current index blocks in cache to perform super-fast inserts.

Can anyone comment?

Mark Teehan
Perth/Australia

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