Re: debunking partitioning

"Anurag Varma" <avdbi_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:uus05tk7t3ba43_at_corp.supernews.com...
> In case you are interested
> Jonathan Lewis has a good comparison/comments on partitioned tables and
partitioned views in his book Practial Oracle8i ....

Thanks Anurag: I found Jonathan's article on google. His analysis is much more comprehensive, of course. Couple additions:

1. Partitioned Views and Partitioned Tables are logically the same thing. Therefore, there is no reason for one being fundamentally "more performant" than the other.
2. I don't quite understand why Jonatan associates the query

where partition_col between a and c
or partition_col between c and d

to the "compare this year and last year". The latter is a selfjoin query

select a.*, b.* from sales a, sales b
where a.year=1999 and b.year=2000
and a.day=b.day -- day-by-day comparison

which doesn't have any ORs in it, right?

3. Partition maintenance independence could be easily acheved with Partitioned Views too. When a user issues a DDL a system trigger rewrites a Partitioned Views so that it doesn't include the altered table anymore. All queries go against the "valid" partitioned exactly as in the Partitioned Tables case. After completion the table is added back.

4. In general, Oracle has been criticised for creating logical concepts without solid justification. Any new logical concept adds a cost for users that have to learn it. Look at the documentation volume! Some cases, like "analyse" existing together with "dbms_stats", are just plain ridiculous. Partitioned tables is just yet another, although arguably more subtle, example. Received on Wed Dec 04 2002 - 13:38:36 CST