merge

As you can tell, I have no idea on a name for what I am about to describe. So let me start from the beginning, and set the scene for an idea I have to utilize a cool new 18c feature.

Often in a transactional-style system the busiest table (let us call it SALES for the sake of this discussion) is also

• the biggest table, after all, it has all of our sales in it,
• the most demanded for table, in that, almost every query in our application wants to access it in some way shape or form.

This is in effect the database version of the Pareto Principle. Everyone wants a slice of that SALES “pie”, and the piece of that pie that is in most demand is typically the most recent data. Your application may have pages that will be showing:

One of the cool things in 18c is the ability to merge partitions without causing a service interruption.  Here’s a video demonstration of that in action:

This is just an accompanying blog post to let you grab the scripts for the demo so that you can try this yourself on livesql.oracle.com, or any of the Oracle Cloud services that will be running 18c in the near future.