Sri Hari Rao Nadella

clipped from www.dba-oracle.com Partitioning is a divide-and-conquer approach to improving Oracle maintenance and SQL performance.  Anyone with un-partitioned databases over 500 gigabytes is courting disaster.  Databases become unmanageable, and serious problems occur:  -          Files recovery takes days, not minutes -          Rebuilding indexes (important to re-claim space and improve performance) can take days -          Queries with full-table scans take hours to complete -          Index range scans become inefficient There are many compelling reasons to implement partitioning for larger databases, and partitioning has become the de-facto standard for systems over 500 gigabytes.  Oracle partitioning has many benefits to improve performance and manageability:  

clipped from www.geekinterview.com Oracle is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System). The Oracle database architecture can be described in terms of logical and physical structures. The advantage of separating the logical and physical structure is that the physical storage structure can be changed without affecting the logical structure.