Re: List partitioning

Partitioning is built into the DB, yes. This is transparent to SQL, ie the SQL does not know or care whether a table is partitioned or not. Having said that, there are SQL extensions that can access the partitions directly.

Tables (and indexes) may be partitioned by range, hash, list, and composites thereof. The number of columns is not relevant, but the total table size (rows * columns * column_size) is, as the main reasons for partitioning are administration and performance. If you partition say by range on month, then it is a simple administrative matter to drop off the oldest partition to keep a fixed number of rotating months in the partitioned table. If you partition say by list and query for a particular value, then query performance is improved because you only need to access the partition that contains that value.

More info can be found here: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b32024/partition.htm#g471747 Received on Sun Dec 02 2007 - 20:55:18 CST