A tech bod at our clients has suggested that we use read-only table partitions to speed up backups. Our table is partioned on a numeric representation of the date (e.g. 20020830) and whilst we need to have the data online, we don't expect to need to update anything more than a week (say) old. The logic goes that if the partitions were read only then there would be no need to back them up more than once.

Is this plausible and, if so, what is the mechanism?

We are using Oracle 8.1.7 on a Solaris box.