Thomasps,

When I ran a terabyte Datawarehouse for qwest and one for AT&T I presented the 'poor mans' approach to management but recommended RAC.

'Poor mans' allowed no updates. We loaded our DW monthly so 24 partions on all the tables for a 2 year window was nothing. We were going to daily processing so I looked into it and was comfortable with 712 partitions/tablespaces based on the type of queries we typically ran against it. The load automation would go like this, add a new partition in a new tablespace, bulk load it, index it, exchange it including indexes for all such fact and dim tables. Analyze it.

Set tablespace to read-only

Export the DD info as Transportable Tablespace, Import it into the 2nd machine.

Query away....