Oracle Partitioning is a great feature.

Large tables can be partitioned into smaller pieces based on data ranges, values or dates, and queries that are designed to respect the partitioning scheme can automatically discount from consideration partitions that do not contain applicable data.

Partitions can be added or removed, moved, made read only, and so on.

That is only a very brief overview of the benefits of partitioning to large database tables, and anyone who had designed a data warehouse will understand why this feature is so powerful.

But it is also very expensive.

Oracle Partitioning is only available as an add-on cost to the already expensive Enterprise Edition license.

But what about if you want to realize some of these benefits without paying for the Partitioning option?  Taking this even further could we implement some form of Partitioning with the massively less expensive Standard Edition?

Continue reading →