Basic question on partitioning

Hi all,
  I've just taken over the architecture of an existing database that's designed to work over six disks on Solaris systems. To improve efficiency, the original group striped the six disks into three and placed all tablespaces on different disks, leaving the OS to place data on different spindles. Partitions are used, but ony to keep track of data by a particular value so that it can be dropped easily when it is outdated. All partitions for a database table are currently stored in the same tablespace and on the same spindle pairs.

I don't believe that this is the optimal configuration for performance. I would like to partition each table across multiple spindles to improve performance and ensure that the loss of one disk does not cause the loss of all data in a table. Can anyone tell me if partitioning tables across mulstiple spindles will improve performance? If so, are there available case studies that can provide me with benchmarks ofr the percentage gain in performance?

Thanks in Advance,
Rob Hale
Nortel Networks. Received on Mon Dec 04 2000 - 17:21:13 CST