Introduction to partitioning

Oracle partitioning, an extra cost option of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, enhances the manageability, performance, and availability of a wide variety of applications. While such technology and cost is beyond the normal practitioner, we will introduce many concepts that apply to the efficient organization of large volumes of data via partitioning. Partitioning allows tables and indexes to be subdivided into smaller pieces, enabling these database objects to be managed and accessed at a finer level of granularity.

Oracle partitioning support is one of the very useful features for managing tables with very large volumes of data. When tables are large, creating indexes, collecting statistics, and other data management tasks take a long time. If the full table scans are used in some execution plans, the queries will take a very long time to execute if the table is large (hundreds of gigabytes in size). Operations such as table recovery and index maintenance...