This document evaluates the different factors impacting the decision if daily, weekly or monthly partitions should be used. Surprisingly even the legal department can impact that decision, and the other areas as performance and manageability become just secondary decision factors.

As the optimal decision depends only on implementation (customer) specific circumstances there exists no general answer to this question. But the criteria listed and the impact evaluated in this document will enable you to find the best decision for your situation.

• Operations Manager
• Application Support Staff
• System-DBA, Application-DBA, Development-DBA
• Legal Department / Compliance Officer (First Chapter only)

Summary...................................................... 4
Audience......................................................4
Tabular Overview............................................. 5
Evaluation................................................... 6
  Legal / Compliance..........................................6
  [P] Performance.............................................7
    [P.1] Cache-Hit Ratio on Inserts..........................7
    [P.2] Index-Access........................................9
    [P.3] Performance on Full-Table-Scans....................10
  [M] Maintenance............................................11
    [M.1] Size of partition (segment size)...................11
    [M.2] Daily backup volume (and time to restore) .........11
    [M.3] Partition maintenance (adding, removing)...........11
    [M.4] Partition Maintenance – Statistics.................12
    [M.5] Partition maintenance - Sorting....................12
    [M.6] Partition Maintenance – Index-Rebuild..............13