John, The use of a date field as the partitioning column is a good choice if the amount of the data is about the same for each date range and the majority of the queries are date related. when you create a table you have to specify the date range for each partition and allow for values greater than the last partitioned date range. I have many table that are partitioned by year and also a table_max_value partition for each table. The table_max_value allows an area for the data to be stired if the date is greater than the current year. Each year end after checking that there is no data in the table_max_value partition I drop the table_max_value partition and create a new_next_year partitoin with the appropriate date value and then recreate the table_max_value partition. The active yearly tables are approx 3 Gig and the max_value partition is 4 Meg. All tables are LMT. It makes the table and data management easier with partitioned tables. Ron >>> "John Dunn" <jdunn@xxxxxxxxx> 01/19/2005 8:31:57 AM >>> I have a table which has a date column I would like to use for range partitioning. However, looking at the documentation examples it appears necessary to specify specific ranges when creating the table e.g. PARTITION part1 VALUES LESS THAN TO_DATE (01-APR-1994, DD-MON-YYYY), PARTITION part1 VALUES GREATER THAN TO_DATE (01-APR-1994, DD-MON-YYYY), Is it always necessary to provide specific range values? What happens at time moves on. Is it necessary to repartition the table to add new time periods? Or is it possible to specify ranges relative to SYSDATE e.g SYSDATE - 30, SYSDATE - 60 etc John -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l