Pro Oracle Database 11g Administration

C H A P T E R  12

Partitioning: Divide and Conquer

If you work with large tables and indexes, at some point you'll experience performance degradation as the row counts grow into the hundreds of millions. Even efficiently written SQL statements executing against appropriately indexed tables eventually slow down as table and index sizes grow into the gigabytes, terabytes, or even higher. For such situations, you have to devise a strategy that allows your database to scale with increasing data volumes.

Oracle provides two key scalability features—parallelism and partitioning—that enable good performance even with massively large databases. Parallelism ...