You shouldn't have problems dropping partition 200401 and keeping partition 200312. The only thing is that if (for any reason) after that you'll try to insert data with January 2004 date, they will go into 200402 partition (if your table is range-partitioned by DATE type column, not list-partitioned by some kind of "month" column). Igor Neyman, OCP DBA ineyman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of mkline1@xxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 10:18 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Keeping December partition through the year We've got a repository that is quite large and so the data can at least be partitioned by month. That's good. But we've got December 2003 data they want to keep. We're now into April... We normally only keep 3 months. What we do is truncate the oldest partition and then load the newest. Eventually, I come along and drop the unused partitions. Now that we are holding 200312, can I safely drop 200401, and others as time goes along, or do I need to keep ALL of them until next December? We're using 100mb unform extents as these can go to 22gb per month, but I could always move them to a 1M uniform tablespace once they are truncated. At this time the 200401 partition is empty, 200312, 200402,and 200403 have data. I'll be creating the 200404 in a couple of weeks. Before they load that, they will truncate 200402. It's 8.1.7.4 on HP-UX. -- Michael Kline, Principle Consultant Business To Business Solutions 13308 Thornridge Ct Midlothian, VA 23112 804-744-1545 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------