[lobster_johnson]

How does this work in Oracle? Seeing as the partitioning constraint would be time-dependent, wouldn't it need to re-evaluate it at regular intervals in order to shuffle data around? Is the feature explicitly time-oriented?

[mulmen]

I don't think oracle can do this exactly but the query planner does understand time based partitions so if you do something like:

   SELECT * FROM partitioned_table WHERE partition_date_key > SYSDATE - 1;

The query planner will only use the most recent partition. Combine this with Oracle's ability to merge partitions and you get "daily" partitions that become "weekly" partitions when the new week starts. Alternately you could wait a month and combine all the days of last month into a single partition and then even combine months into years.

The partition intervals are based on specific dates/times, not on the relative time from query execution.

Oracle also supports row movement which is the biggest missing feature here I believe.