You should plan the number of devices for the table’s segment to balance I/O performance. For best performance, use dedicated physical disks, rather than portions of disks, as database devices, and make sure that no other objects share the devices with the partitioned table.
See the System Administration Guide for guidelines for creating segments.
The steps to follow for partitioning a table depends on where the table is when you start. This section provides examples for the following situations:
The table has not been created and populated yet.
The table exists, but it is not on the database segment where you want the table to reside.
The table exists on the segment where you want it to reside, and you want to redistribute the data to improve performance, or you want to add devices to the segment.
The following sections provide procedures for a number
of situations, including those in which severe space limitations
in the database make partitioning and creating clustered indexes
very difficult. These complex procedures are needed only in special
cases. If you have ample room on your database devices, the process
of partitioning and maintaining partitioned table performance requires
only a few simple steps.
