Apress.Expert.Oracle.Database.Architecture.9i.and.10g.Programming.Techniques.and.Solutions.Sep.2005

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CHAPTER 13 ■ PARTITIONING
6 ( PARTITION part_1 VALUES LESS THAN
7 (to_date('01/01/2005','dd/mm/yyyy')),
8 PARTITION part_2 VALUES LESS THAN
9 (to_date('01/01/2006','dd/mm/yyyy'))
10 )
11 /
Table created.
■Note We are using the date format DD/MM/YYYY in the CREATE TABLE to make this “international.” If we
used a format of DD-MON-YYYY, then the CREATE TABLE would fail with ORA-01843: not a valid month
if the abbreviation of January was not Jan on your system. The NLS_LANGUAGE setting would affect this.
I have used the three-character month abbreviation in the text and inserts, however, to avoid any ambiguity
as to which component is the day and which is the month.
Figure 13-1 shows that Oracle will inspect the value of the RANGE_KEY_COLUMN and, based
on that value, insert it into one of the two partitions.
Figure 13-1. Range partition insert example
The rows inserted were specifically chosen with the goal of demonstrating that the
partition range is strictly less than and not less than or equal to. We first insert the value
15-DEC-2004, which will definitely go into partition PART_1. We also insert a row with a date/time
that is one second before 01-JAN-2005—that row will also will go into partition PART_1 since