As Sandeep had mentioned, all the queries will definitely have acct_id. But he didn't mention whether cr_date will also 'always' be there. So, if we partition by cr_date and the query does not specify it, we wouldn't see a 'PARTITION RANGE ITERATOR', but we would still get a 'PARTITION LIST ITERATOR' for the sub-partitions on ACCT_ID (not as efficient as when table would have been partitioned on acct_id). So, in the approach I had suggested (partition by acct_id and subpartition by ret_key): 1) We get partition elimination since acct_id is always there. 2) We address retention by clubing Site_id and Cr_date together. In queries where acct_id and cr_date are mentioned, we could have a LOCAL index created on cr_date only. So, partition pruning would happen for acct_id, and then index-access would happen for cr_date condition. Same would hold true by creating a Local index for Site_Id. For the above design, Best would be if the application could "ADD" a RET_KEY condition to the queries. I was thinking of FGAC, Table Function where you could add a predicate for RET_KEY (transparent to the user) to any query accessing this table, but that needs some testing. Deepak --- jaromir nemec <jaromir@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Sandeep, > > > > a slightly modification of the design of Deepak is > as follows > > > > range partition by cr_date > > subpartition by acct_id > > > > this option is optimized for access; queries with > equal condition on acct_it > and cr_date prune to only one subpartition. Queries > with interval of cr_date > (between) prune to a subset of subpartitions. The > trade off here is that you > can only drop subpartition when all of the site_id > in a particular acct_id > are timed out. Prior that delete must be used. > > This issue can be resolved using the concatenated > key (acct_id + site_id) > for subpartitioning (as proposed by Deepak) but the > price is that you loose > a great part of pruning described above. > > You should therefore definitely consider the > priorities of access vs. > administration. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l