Local partitioned indexes and partition exchange in 8.1.7

Hi Listers,  

One of our customers has problems with an application that keeps getting slower. It has a relatively large central table without indexes which is loaded daily with about 3 million rows. The table is range partitioned per day. Looks like a lot of querying is done on the table with the necessary partition full scan. Approximately 3% of the rows is updated after insertion, judging from the contents of an audit table. In oracle 9i I would suggest a local partitioned index on the relevant columns . And I am thinking of building the index using partition exchange to minimize down-time. But the customer is still on 8.1.7 and I have no experience using that version with these features . Are there any known issues with this approach in 8.1.7 that any of the listers knows of? Better approaches are always welcome of course.  

TIA,
Eric.

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l