Database Partitioning for the E-Business Suite

New Whitepaper: Database Partitioning for the E-Business Suite
By Steven Chan on May 28, 2008 12:13 AM

Some readers complain that we don't have sufficient documentation to cover all possible scenarios and topics of interest. This is a valid observation. As your E-Business Suite deployments grow in complexity and scope, keeping ahead of your questions and new requirements is a constant challenge.

In my position as the editor of this blog, something I do only in my so-called free time, my situation is the odd inverse of yours, namely: the rate at which we release new Metalink Notes far-outstrips my capacity to read and announce them to the world. Here's a much-belated announcement about a database partitioning whitepaper produced by our Applications Performance Group.

What Is Database Partitioning?

Partitioning allows a single database table and its associated indexes to be broken into smaller components depending on the table and choice of index partitioning methods. Several E-Business Suite modules take advantage of database partitioning right out of the box, and custom partitioning is also fully supported. I've covered database partitioning concepts for Apps environments in more depth in this older article.






Best Practices for Partitioning Apps Databases

As I've noted before, we have a group in our Applications Development division that's dedicated to optimizing the E-Business Suite's performance. As a member of this Applications Performance group, Mohsin Sameen has worked extensively with some of our enterprise-class customers -- including many of the largest companies in the world -- on fine-tuning the performance of of their high-volume Apps environments.

Mohsin has distilled these experiences into an extensive and in-depth paper on database partitioning:

Database Partitioning for Oracle E-Business Suite (Metalink Note 554539.1)

Mohsin's excellent whitepaper covers topics such as:

Overview of database partitioning concepts
Table partitioning strategies involving range, list, hash, composite, and multi-column partitions
Index partitioning methods, including global and local partitioned indexes
Step-by-step decision framework for using partitions
Partition maintenance operations
Partitioning case study

The knee-jerk reaction answer to a performance problem is often to throw more hardware at it. If you have a large E-Business Suite environment where the growth rate of your historical transactional data is starting to affect performance, I'd strongly recommend reading this whitepaper. It's entirely possible that you could use it to squeeze some additional performance out of your existing environment without the added expense of new hardware.

Related Articles

Using Database Partitioning with the E-Business Suite
Performance Tuning for the E-Business Suite
Performance Tuning the Apps Database Layer
Master Class in Apps 11i Performance Tuning
Partitioning and Purging Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite