Hi, I've gotten preliminary approval to buy a server and load a *lot* of data into it. One table will eventually have 4.5Bn 330 bytes rows, the other 9Bn 300 byte rows. Other will "only" have a billion rows. They are easily partitioned by yyyymm, which we call FISCAL_PERIOD. (In fact, the app creates the integer FISCAL_PERIOD by extracting year and month from transaction date: YEAR*100+MONTH.) Even though using a view means that it would have to be recreated each period as the oldest table is dropped, it seems that it would still be easier to work with, since you wouldn't have to worry about preventing a badly behaving user from inserting into the DDL partition's parent table and create 588 CHECK constraints (12 per year x 7 years x 7 base tables). The most important issue, though, is query speed. Assuming excellent index support for query WHERE clauses, regardless of whether partitioning or a "viewed UNION ALL", which will the query optimizer and constraint_exclusion be more friendly towards? Thanks, Ron -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Is "common sense" really valid? For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins are mud people. However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong.
