Frequently asked questions on Database Partitioning to improve application performance

Answer

Question:
Are you allowed to DROP old partitions?

Answer: In general, dropping partitions may also drop the data present in them, from application perspective it may cause in-consistencies.

Question:
Do the regular App purge process actually RELEASES Binary LOB data in the Oracle Database?

Answer: The purge agents fire delete SQLs to clear data. As with all delete SQLs, this may not free up space occupied by BLOB columns. The same needs to be done separately in the Database.

Question:
To use locally partitioned indexes, Can you change the primary key and is this supported?

Answer: - It is not advised to change primary key for product tables. The default primary key for a new record being inserted in any product table is typically of format which contains date and time of the record creation. This is an internal logic and not documented. It will vary based on factors some of which are  database used, single/multischema etc.
You can inspect the primary keys for existing records and co-relate them with createts column.
For example:
For an installation with oracle, the key may look like "20171026164012519" here the highlighted part in bold is YYYYMMDDHHMI i.e. 26 oct 2017 16:40.
However you need to be careful, that there may be cases where primary is explicitly set to a custom value, in those cases the above pattern may not be visible. Also, the pattern may vary with different factors and versions and may change in future without any notice as this is an internal implementation of the default primary key.