Hi;
Partitioning is also good for table-data which is categorized in some values, like status-types for application-objects;

3. The administration of partitioned tables is a critical point.
it depends on how you partitition your table. For example if your partition-criteria grows ( date for example ) then you have add partitions from time to time.

Partitioned tables alway use more place on Disk!

if the distribution of the partition-key is not clear, then you have to create scripts to output partition-ddl scanning the taabledata thru the script.

Check if you can access data with bitmapped indexes. Combining some bitmapped indexed coulumns in a query can result fast answertime and little indexfiles.

Oracle should provid a partition-manager, to ease the use of this feature.

In spite of all these points partitioning can be the last way to access large tables fast.

Orca