[mbell]

One use case I've used them for is when you have a table that is 'under fire', and you need to add bulk data to it. Doing a large insert into a table like that can cause various issues. Instead I a partitioned table and each bulk load is a separate partition. This allows doing the bulk load to a 'clean' table out of the line of fire. You can then apply indexes, do cache warming or whatever else you may want to do to it, then attach the partition to the parent table to make it 'active'. As long as you have covering constraint on the partition that matches the partition constraint, this results is minimal impact to query performance. We do bulk loads of partitions with ~100-200M rows this way and it's barely noticeable to the query side latency.