Manageability

In addition to the performance benefits, partitioning also enables the optimal data management for large objects in an OLTP environment. Every partition maintenance operation in Oracle Database can be extended to atomically include global and local index maintenance, enabling the execution of any partition maintenance operation without affecting the 24x7 availability of an OLTP environment.

Partition maintenance operations in OLTP systems occur often because of ILM scenarios. In these scenarios, [range | interval] partitioned tables, or [range | interval]-* composite partitioned tables, are common.

Some business cases for partition maintenance operations include scenarios surrounding the separation of application data. For example, a retail company runs the same application for multiple branches in a single schema. Depending on the branch revenues, the application (as separate partitions) is stored on more efficient storage. List partitioning, or list-* composite partitioning, is a common partitioning strategy for this type of business case.

You can use hash partitioning, or hash subpartitioning for tables, in OLTP systems to obtain similar performance benefits to the performance benefits achieved in data warehouse environments. The majority of the daily OLTP workload consists of relatively small operations, executed serially. Periodic batch operations, however, may execute in parallel and benefit from the distribution improvements that hash partitioning and subpartitioning can provide for partition-wise joins. For example, end-of-the-month interest calculations may be executed in parallel to complete within a nightly batch window.

This section contains the following topics:

For more information about the performance benefits of partitioning, refer to Partitioning for Availability, Manageability, and Performance.